Wield the power of infinite creative energy. Assisted by AI with the magic of Wand
Senior Backend Engineer
Location
Connecticut + 8 moreAll locations: Connecticut | New Jersey | New York | Maryland | Massachusetts | Pennsylvania | Rhode Island | Vermont | Virginia
Posted
9 days ago
Salary
0
Seniority
Senior
Job Description
Senior Backend Engineer
Wand
• Own meaningful parts of the backend • Scope, design, ship, and stabilize the services the rest of the product depends on. Own the fix when something misbehaves at 2am. • Make the architectural calls — data model evolution, caching boundaries, where to spend latency budget, when to refactor and when to rewrite. • Work fluidly across the data layer. Relational stores at scale (MySQL, MariaDB) and document stores (Firestore) are both in the toolkit, and you know which to reach for and when. • Treat infrastructure as code as part of the job. Terraform and Ansible aren’t someone else’s problem; a service isn’t shipped until it can be re-deployed without you in the room. • Treat performance, observability, and operational health as part of “done.” Dashboards and alerts ship with the feature. • Move across the stack when the work demands it • Open TypeScript PRs in the Electron app when a feature is better wired end-to-end than handed off. You’re comfortable on both sides of the boundary. • Have opinions on UX workflows and product surfaces, not just API shapes. The best backend engineers we’ve worked with care how the thing feels. • Get into the Electron app, the overlay, or the web surface when that’s where the bug actually is. • Drive the backend roadmap • Take ownership of what we work on, what we cut, and what we sequence. The Head of Engineering will partner closely early on; the bar is that this person eventually drives the roadmap on their own. • Push cross-cutting initiatives nobody else will — observability gaps, data model debt, perf regressions, API hygiene. The work that quietly compounds. • Provide substantive code review, mentor where it lands naturally, and raise the level of design discussions when the design needs it, not just the implementation. • Bring thoughtfulness and genuine passion for the work. Contribute to roadmap decisions with an eye on outcomes.
Job Requirements
- 6+ years building production backend systems, ideally for a consumer product with real scale. You can talk about what you built, who used it, and what shipped because of it.
- Strong with PHP 8.2 (Laravel or Symfony), or comparable depth in another modern web stack with a credible plan to ramp on PHP fast. Not a hard requirement — we care more about the engineer than the language.
- Relational data modeling at scale (MySQL, MariaDB, or Postgres). You’ve made the call between a wide table and a join table and lived with the consequences.
- Comfortable across data stores. You’ve also reached for a document or NoSQL database (Firestore or similar) when the shape of the data called for it — and you know when not to.
- Infrastructure as code is a default. Terraform, Ansible, or comparable. You don’t ship a service without thinking about how it gets deployed and re-deployed.
- Comfortable working full stack. TypeScript in an Electron or web app isn’t a foreign country — you’ve shipped there before.
- Outcome-oriented and high ownership. You measure yourself by what the team shipped, not by what you personally wrote. Ambiguous problems read as interesting, not as blockers — you’ll pick something up and figure it out.
- Fluent with the AI tooling that’s reshaping how engineers work. Claude Code or equivalent, the coding-agent ecosystem, MCPs, the workflows people are actually using day-to-day. You stay current because you find it interesting, not because someone told you to.
- Opinions on UX workflows and product. You push back on product when the API shape they want will paint us into a corner; you push back on yourself when you’re optimizing the wrong thing.
- Strong written and verbal communication. You write a design doc that gets read all the way through.
- Self-managing. You can pick up an ambiguous initiative and drive it without daily check-ins.
Benefits
- Competitive compensation and equity package
- Fully remote work arrangement
- The chance to build core infrastructure for an audience of 40M+ players who will actually feel the difference
- A team of people who genuinely love games, move incredibly fast, and care deeply about what they build.
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