Expert Online Services Software Engineer (Go)

Location: Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

Salary: $114,300–$169,140 per year, plus potential bonus, equity, and benefits.

Company

Small Axe is a standalone hirify.global studio developing a new AAA sports franchise from its Vancouver, British Columbia location.

What you will do

• Architect, build, and own large-scale backend services powering multiplayer and online features from design through live operations.
• Set technical direction, architecture standards, and engineering best practices for online services.
• Lead technical planning for major initiatives, including technical designs, work breakdowns, and dependency analysis.
• Model infrastructure costs and capacity based on projected player populations.
• Collaborate with designers, artists, producers, engineering leadership, platform partners, publisher technology teams, and external vendors.
• Review and develop clean, performant, well-tested code while mentoring engineers and contributing to hiring.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience building backend services and online systems for games.
• Expert proficiency in Go for production backend services.
• Experience shipping and scaling live online services for millions of players.
• Deep expertise in distributed, event-driven systems and networking protocols.
• Production experience with AWS, Kubernetes, relational databases such as PostgreSQL, observability, monitoring, alerting, distributed tracing, and CI/CD.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience, along with strong communication and technical leadership skills.

Nice to have

• Experience with Unreal Engine 5 or similar engines, especially dedicated server and client networking code in C++.
• Proficiency in Python.
• Experience integrating with PlayStation Network, Xbox network, Steam, or other first-party online services.
• Experience modeling infrastructure costs and capacity for live services at scale.
• Passion for playing or watching sports.

Culture & Benefits

• Work with a newly established studio focused on bold ideas, technical excellence, and creative collaboration.
• Collaborate across design, art, production, engineering, publisher technology, platform, and vendor teams.
• Regular employees may receive bonus and/or equity awards in addition to medical, financial, and other benefits.
• Accommodations are available for candidates participating in the application or interview process.