Senior Backend Engineer
About the role
Eleventh Hour Games is a fast growing studio, focused on a passion for top-down action RPGs. We value open communication, close-knit teamwork, and opportunity for ownership and growth! Our mission is to gather and empower the next generation of creators to forge extraordinary games. Extraordinary games build passionate communities, which create passionate people. Passionate people turn into next year's creators. With our breakout title Last Epoch, we are moving fast into the next round of adventure!
THE OPPORTUNITY:
As a Senior Backend Engineer at Eleventh Hour Games, you will play a key role in shaping the technical direction of EHG. You will own core service architecture and scalability for gameplay-critical features like game server hosting, matchmaking, inventories/economy, and telemetry all while ensuring reliability under peak traffic and enabling rapid iteration by the broader engineering team. The ideal candidate thrives with complex problem-solving and brings strong communication skills to drive collaboration across a fully remote, global team.
WHAT YOU'LL DO:- Own the architecture of core backend systems for Last Epoch: gameplay services, state/inventory services, player progression, and economy-related workflows.
- Design and implement scalable APIs and event-driven pipelines.
- Build for high availability and performance on Azure, including data storage, caching, queues, and background processing.
- Establish engineering standards for C# backend development: patterns, performance practices, resilience, observability, and security.
- Drive reliability practices: idempotency, consistency models, graceful degradation, incident response, and chaos-minded fault handling.
- Partner with game design and product to translate gameplay requirements into robust technical solutions.
- Improve code and feature velocity through reviews, architecture docs, and reusable frameworks/libraries.
- Contribute to CI/CD and operational readiness: automated tests, deployments, monitoring/alerting, and run books.
RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Security & Compliance: Apply secure-by-default practices (authn/authz, proper secret handling, least privilege, and threat modeling for exposed endpoints).
- System Design & Ownership: Define service boundaries, contracts, and data models; make key tradeoffs for cost/latency/consistency.
- Scalability & Reliability: Implement durable messaging patterns, backpressure strategies, and fault-tolerant workflows.
- Performance Engineering: Optimize hot paths in C# services and reduce latency through caching, batching, and efficient data access.
- Observability: Ensure logs/metrics/traces support debugging and live operations; set SLOs/SLAs where appropriate.
- On-Call: Diagnose and lead resolution of complex service, infrastructure, and live-ops issues; participation in an on-call rotation (Pager Duty)
QUALIFICATIONS:
- 5+ years building and supporting online services with SLA requirements
- Strong backend engineering experience writing high performance C#
- Production experience on Azure, with specific focus on AKS and CosmosDB
- Demonstrated experience building distributed systems and event-driven architectures.
- Deep understanding of data consistency, idempotency, retries, and failure modes.
- Strong hands-on skills in API design, performance tuning, and operational excellence.
- Experience designing systems that support real-time or near-real-time gameplay loops (sessions, lobbies, inventory updates, or matchmaking/server instance lifecycles).
- Background in systems design, with ability to build maintainable, scalable solutions
- Experience with mentoring engineers, code reviews, and setting technical standards
- Excellent cross-discipline collaboration and communication skills
PREFERENCES:
- 2+ years experience working in a game studio
- Experience configuring console storefronts (PlayStation, Xbox, Switch)
- Experience with PlayFab, Nitrado/GameFabric
- Unity and Unreal experience
- Experience optimizing performance across platforms (PC and console)
- Knowledge of ARPGs, action combat systems, or similar
- Experience building for GAAS
Reasonable Accommodation
KRAFTON Americas is committed to the full inclusion of all qualified individuals. As part of this commitment, the Company will ensure that persons with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodations. If reasonable accommodation is needed to apply for an open position, perform essential job functions, and/or to receive other benefits and privileges of employment, please contact the HR Talent team at KRAFTON Americas, to begin the interactive process.
EEOC statement
KRAFTON Americas provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type.
Due to recent scams, our recruiters will only reach out to you via @sds.com, @krafton.com, @unknownworlds.com or @pubg.com. If you received an email and are unsure you can always email recruiting_ka@krafton.com.
