Principal Server Engineer (Live Games)

Location: Remote from Serbia, Romania, Hungary, Turkey, or Spain

Company

hirify.global develops live games supported by high-traffic backend infrastructure.

What you will do

• Design, build, and maintain Go and Python backend services for live game titles supporting more than 1M daily active users.
• Own PostgreSQL schema design, query performance, indexing, and data layout improvements.
• Drive horizontal scaling by optimizing CPU and memory usage, serialization, and lock contention.
• Profile and resolve memory leaks, CPU spikes, deadlocks, performance issues, and production outages.
• Architect and maintain Redis, KeyDB, or Memcached caching and state-management layers.
• Design and run load tests to identify system breaking points before releases.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in backend or server engineering.
• Deep expertise in Go and Python, including language internals, execution models, goroutine management, garbage-collection tuning, and zero-allocation techniques.
• Strong PostgreSQL experience with scalable schema design, query-plan analysis, and index-strategy optimization.
• Experience scaling systems supporting at least 350k daily active users and handling live production traffic.
• Hands-on experience resolving memory leaks, CPU spikes, deadlocks, complex performance issues, and outages through root-cause analysis.
• Experience with Redis, KeyDB, or Memcached, TDD/BDD, load testing, Nakama, and GCP or Google App Engine.

Nice to have

• CI/CD and DevOps experience with GitHub Actions or GitLab CI.
• Monitoring and alerting experience with Prometheus or Datadog.
• Knowledge of WebSockets, gRPC/HTTP2, and UDP/TCP tuning for low-latency real-time systems.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote work from Serbia, Romania, Hungary, Turkey, or Spain.
• Market-competitive, tax-free USD salary.
• Paid time off.
• Annual performance reviews.