Lead Backend Engineer (Gamedev)

Location: Remote within the United States or Canada; applicants must be legally authorized to work in one of these countries and work within North American time zones (EST–PST).

Salary: $196.0k–$203.0k per year.

Company

hirify.global is a fully distributed game studio developing a multiplayer fantasy adventure centered on shared exploration, friendships, and emergent stories.

What you will do

• Lead, mentor, and grow the Backend Engineering team through goal-setting, 1:1s, feedback, hiring, and career development.
• Own team processes, including planning, code review standards, on-call, bug triage, scoping, and estimation.
• Review pull requests, unblock difficult technical problems, evolve backend architecture, and write production code for critical-path systems.
• Own reliability, service-level objectives, incident response, infrastructure cost, and backend scalability.
• Partner with game design, marketing, production, the Technical Director, and studio leadership on feature scope, roadmaps, risks, and trade-offs.

Requirements

• 6+ years of professional backend experience; games or live-service development is strongly preferred.
• 2+ years of directly managing or leading engineers.
• Strong Kotlin or Java skills and familiarity with Kubernetes, Grafana, Terraform, and load-testing tools.
• Hands-on experience scaling backend systems for a global audience, including debugging, monitoring, and alerting.
• Strong understanding of software architecture and design patterns, with sound judgment about when to apply them or keep solutions simple.
• Experience collaborating with design, marketing, and production on a shipped or in-development game.
• Ability to operate with high ownership in a lean, multi-disciplinary team.
• Strong communication skills, including explaining technical trade-offs to non-engineers and aligning a small team around a plan.
• Legal authorization to work in the United States or Canada is required; Gardens does not assist with work authorization or work visas.

Nice to have

• Experience taking a live-service game through launch and post-launch operations.
• Experience at an independent or mid-size studio.

Culture & Benefits

• Fully distributed remote studio working across North American time zones.
• Collaborative environment emphasizing curiosity, adaptability, sound judgment, shared ownership, feedback, and continuous learning.
• Competitive salaries, pay transparency, and stock options.
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage; life insurance; short- and long-term disability benefits.
• 401(k) contributions in the U.S. or RRSP and DPSP contributions in Canada, plus paid parental leave.
• Primarily sedentary computer-based work requiring at least six hours per day of sustained monitor, keyboard, mouse, and game-controller use.

Hiring process

• Five stages: People Operations introduction, Hiring Manager interview, panel interview with three one-hour sections, Gardeners Debrief, and offer.
• Interviews are one-hour video calls on Google Meet unless otherwise noted.