Principal Backend Engineer (Live / Game)Primary: Bay Area (San Francisco / Peninsula) | Secondary: NYC
The OpportunityWe're doing an AI-first engineering rebuild for a company that already has an audience of 100M+ people. This is a zero-to-one build with no legacy constraints. You're not joining to babysit existing infrastructure. You're joining to design the real-time backend that absorbs a creator-triggered traffic spike and keeps every player in the game.
The ProductYou'll own the backend powering Beast Industries' live and real-time game experiences. Traffic here is spiky and unforgiving: a content drop or a creator event can drive a concurrency surge an order of magnitude beyond normal load, and the system has to hold. That means:
- Define how live-service backend infrastructure is built, operated, and evolved across every active title.
- Design real-time systems (matchmaking, state sync, real-time messaging, leaderboards, in-game economy) that stay correct and fast under spike-driven load.
- Set the reliability bar: SLOs, capacity planning, incident response, and resilience patterns for systems under massive consumer load.
What You'll Do- Set multi-year backend architecture direction for live game systems, balancing scalability, latency, cost, and reliability.
- Be the principal technical advisor to engineering and product leadership on backend strategy and the high-stakes technology calls.
- Lead the design and review of high-concurrency, low-latency systems where correctness and performance both matter.
- Own reliability strategy for spiky, event-driven systems, and get other teams to actually adopt and hold to it.
- Drive the architecture review and RFC process, raising the quality bar across backend engineering.
- Solve the most complex distributed-systems problems where the textbook patterns don't fully apply.
- Mentor staff and senior engineers, and represent our engineering practice externally through talks and writing.
Who You Are- AI-Native: You're already burning through tokens and using AI coding agents daily to move faster.
- Distributed-Systems Master: Typically 15+ years building and operating backends at consumer scale, with real depth in real-time or live-service architecture: high concurrency, low latency, eventual consistency, horizontal scaling, fault tolerance.
- Battle-Tested at Scale: You've owned backend architecture for systems serving large, spike-driven user bases, and you've led the response when one of them broke in production.
- Direction-Setter: You've set technical direction adopted across multiple teams or titles, not just inside one team.
Depth in backend languages and real-time tech appropriate to live game systems (Go, C++, Rust, Java, or equivalent) and the relevant data/state stores. Bonus points for direct game backend experience (matchmaking, netcode-adjacent services, game state, in-game economies), operating through large unpredictable traffic events tied to media or creator moments, and contributions to the broader engineering community.
Benefits- Equity: Highly competitive equity package designed for a foundational hire.
- Hybrid Model: Expected ~3 days per week in-office (Bay Area or NYC).
- Competitive Salary
- Generous Medical (Blue Cross Blue Shield), Dental, Vision and company-paid Life Insurance
- Company contributions to employee Health Savings Accounts (HSA)
- 401k Plan with Safe Harbor company-matching
- Flexible vacation policy and paid company holidays
- Company-provided technology package
- Relocation assistance where applicable, including travel and company-provided housing for the first 90 days
