Principal Server Engineer

UserWise · Serbia · Romania +3 more

Discipline
Programming
Seniority
Principal/Staff
Work model
Remote
Employment type
Permanent
Pay
Pay not stated
Posted
21 Sep
First seen on Hakken
19 Oct

Apply on the studio's site

About the role

About the Role

We're looking for a Principal Server Engineer to own the backend systems powering our live games - services currently supporting 1M+ DAU. You'll be responsible for performance, scalability, and reliability at the core of our infrastructure, working closely with the engineering team on everything from schema design to incident response.
Experience: 8+ years

Nice to Have

  • CI/CD and DevOps experience (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI) plus monitoring/alerting (Prometheus, Datadog)
  • Strong grasp of networking protocols — WebSockets, gRPC/HTTP2, UDP/TCP tuning for low-latency real-time systems

Requirements

Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and maintain Go/Python backend services for live, high-traffic game titles, including server-authoritative logic and runtime modules on Nakama
  • Extend and operate Nakama (Heroic Labs) for core game services: authentication, matchmaking, leaderboards, storage, RPCs, and realtime multiplayer
  • Own database schema design and query performance across PostgreSQL systems, including Nakama's storage layer
  • Drive horizontal scaling strategy (Nakama clustering, stateless services), optimizing CPU/memory footprint and reducing lock contention over vertical scaling
  • Profile and resolve memory leaks, CPU spikes, and deadlocks in production
  • Lead root-cause investigations for performance issues and outages, from detection through resolution
  • Architect and maintain in-memory caching/state layers (Redis/KeyDB/Memcached)
  • Design and run load tests against Nakama and supporting services to surface breaking points ahead of release

Requirements

Crucial

  • Deep Go & Python expertise: language internals, execution models, and performance tuning (goroutine management, GC tuning, zero-allocation techniques)
  • Strong PostgreSQL fluency: scalable schema design, query plan analysis, index strategy optimization, with real examples of resolving bottlenecks via data layout or query architecture changes (experience with Nakama's storage layer or CockroachDB a plus)
  • Proven experience scaling systems supporting 350k+ DAU, with a horizontal-scaling-first philosophy (efficient serialization/deserialization via Protobuf/MsgPack, reduced lock contention)
  • Hands-on profiling experience: identifying and resolving memory leaks, CPU spikes, and deadlocks
  • At least 2 concrete examples of complex production performance issues or outages, including root cause analysis and resolution methodology
  • At least 2 released production projects as a core backend engineer handling live traffic

Important

  • Practical experience with Nakama (Heroic Labs): custom Go runtime modules (Lua/TypeScript a plus), matchmaker, storage engine, realtime sockets, and running Nakama clusters in production
  • Hands-on experience with Redis, KeyDB, or Memcached: caching, rate-limiting, state management, including cache stampede mitigation, serialization overhead, and eviction policy design
  • Solid TDD/BDD judgment and practical load-testing experience (e.g., Artillery), including realtime/socket workloads
  • Practical GCP/Google App Engine experience: deploying, monitoring, and scaling serverless/container services

Benefits

  • Market competitive, tax-free USD salaries
  • Paid Time Off
  • Annual Performance Reviews

From the studio's careers page (workable). Checked 10 Nov.