BuildPrize
BuildPrize is an AI-native venture studio where ideas, capital, and talent come together to co-create products people use-and love-every day. We blend AI, behavioral science, and gamification to launch human-centered ventures with real-world impact.
We co-build with operators, validate fast through tight build-measure-learn loops, and apply AI plus gamification patterns to drive long-term engagement. Our current focus spans AI ventures that stick, engagement tech, health and wellness, and education and financial empowerment.
The Role: Lead Backend Engineer
You’ll own the backend architecture for our real-time PvP experiences—designing, building, and operating low-latency services that scale globally. You’ll lead a small team, partner closely with developers/engineers, and set the bar for reliability, performance, and developer experience.
What you’ll do
- Architect for scale & speed: Design multi-region, low-latency systems (authoritative game services, matchmaking, leaderboards, chat, events).
- Ship production code: Implement clean, well-tested services and APIs (gRPC/WebSockets/HTTP), data models, and game server logic.
- Own reliability: Define SLOs/error budgets, instrument with tracing/metrics/logging (e.g., OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana), and run incident reviews.
- Optimize relentlessly: Profile hotspots, reduce tail latency, tune caches, and design backpressure/degeneration modes for high traffic.
- Lead the team: Mentor engineers, drive code reviews/standards, and coordinate with gameplay, DevOps, and design for smooth releases.
- Operate what you build: CI/CD, blue-green/canary rollouts, autoscaling, cost-aware architecture, on-call rotation.
- Partner cross-functionally: Translate game design & product goals into technical plans; balance time-to-market with long-term quality.
- Build for reuse: Create libraries, templates, and tooling that speed up future game backends.
What you’ll bring
- Proven backend experience building high-throughput, low-latency systems (games, realtime apps, or adjacent).
- Leadership: 2+ years leading projects/teams; clear technical direction and strong mentorship.
- Languages: Production experience in Go (preferred). Bonus: Rust, Java, or Node/TypeScript.
- Data stores: Hands-on with Redis (caching, pub/sub, streams) and both SQL (Postgres/MySQL) and NoSQL (e.g., DynamoDB/Cassandra/Cockroach).
- Protocols: WebSockets, gRPC, REST; understanding of tick loops, state sync, reconciliation, and matchmaking/ELO systems.
- Cloud & containers: Docker (must), Kubernetes/microservices (plus), infra-as-code (Terraform/Pulumi) a plus.
- Observability & reliability: Tracing/metrics/logging, incident response, performance testing, load testing.
- Delivery: CI/CD, feature flags, staged rollouts, blue-green/canary.
- Good fundamentals: Distributed systems, concurrency, caching, queues/event streams (e.g., Kafka/Pub/Sub), idempotency, rate limiting, security basics.
- Nice to have: GCP/AWS, service mesh (Istio/Linkerd), message ordering strategies, anti-cheat basics, GDPR/CCPA awareness.
Why BuildPrize
- Scope & impact: Greenfield architecture that will power multiple titles.
- Mentorship culture: Lead, coach, and help shape our engineering org.
- Focused pace: Fewer priorities, deeper craft, measurable results.
- Flexible work: Remote-friendly with regional hubs for sprint weeks.
- Growth budget: Conferences, courses, and tools to sharpen your edge.
How to apply
To apply for this position, click the "Apply Now" button, which will redirect you to our application form.