Senior Back-End Engineer / Service Engineer

This is a contractor position through X-Team. In this role, you’ll design, build, and maintain the foundational backend microservices and developer tools that power a world-class gaming experience. Working across multi-language codebases (Java, Go, C++, Python, or C#) and cloud-native infrastructure, you’ll help keep live services reliable, scalable, and performant for players around the globe. You’ll author architectural design documents, establish operational best practices, support live services, and partner with backend teams across the broader gaming ecosystem to deliver high-quality experiences at scale.

Key Responsibilities

• Microservices Development: Write, maintain, and review high-performance backend code across multiple languages and tech stacks supporting this game. 
• Architecture & System Design: Author architectural design documents and lead the end-to-end execution of scalable, fault-tolerant service components.
• Cross-Team Coordination: Partner with backend service teams, product managers, and non-technical stakeholders across the ecosystem to align feature deliverables.
• Operational Excellence & On-Call: Participate in rotational on-call for live product support, diagnosing and resolving live service incidents to maintain global uptime.
• Process & Testing Standards: Enforce engineering best practices, including rigorous code reviews, automated unit/integration testing, and deployment pipeline improvements.

Must Have

• Core Backend Engineering: 4+ years of deep, hands-on production programming in at least one primary backend language (Java, Go, C/C++, Python, or C#).
• Distributed Systems Architecture: Proven experience building fault-tolerant distributed microservices from the ground up (requirements gathering, system design, execution).
• Live Service Operations & On-Call: Direct experience operating, monitoring, and troubleshooting live production web services, including participating in on-call rotations.
• Engineering Best Practices: Track record of defining team-level technical processes, authoring architectural design documents, leading code reviews, and writing automated test suites.
• Geographic & Schedule Alignment: Remote position based in Brazil or Mexico (or LatAm) with 6 to 8 hours of daily overlap with North American business hours.
• Cross-Functional Communication: Excellent spoken and written English, with the ability to coordinate with partner engineering teams and non-technical stakeholders.

Nice to Have

• Cloud Platform Depth: Hands-on experience developing and deploying services on AWS or Azure.
• Container Orchestration: Direct experience with Docker and Kubernetes for service deployment and management.
• Scale & Live-Ops Telemetry: Experience operating high-scale, low-latency microservices supporting large concurrent user bases.
• Experimentation Frameworks: Familiarity with telemetry data pipelines, A/B testing frameworks, dark launches, and experiment-driven service design.
• Gaming Ecosystem Context: Familiarity with multiplayer live-service backend architecture.