Senior Server Engineer (Game Development)

TL;DR

Senior Server Engineer (Game Development): Designing, implementing, and evolving highly scalable backend solutions for hirify.global's games with an accent on critical game server technology and Live Operations. Focus on building platforms for hundreds of millions of active players, ensuring stability, performance, and operability in distributed systems.

Location: Onsite in Helsinki, Finland. Relocation support provided to Helsinki.

Company

hirify.global is a games company from Helsinki, Finland, known for games like Hay Day, Clash of Clans, Boom Beach, Clash Royale, and Brawl Stars, aiming to create great games played for years.

What you will do

• Design, implement, and evolve highly scalable backend solutions for games.
• Take technical ownership of critical central game server technology from development to production.
• Collaborate with game teams to understand their needs and facilitate central system usage.
• Troubleshoot production and customer issues, coordinating long-term solutions.
• Participate in a rotating on-call duty for production environments.
• Contribute to best practices for scalability, reliability, availability, security, and operability.

Requirements

• Strong experience in server-side Java, including concurrency and distributed systems.
• Proven ability to design and implement high-performance, scalable distributed systems.
• Experience with cloud platforms (e.g., AWS or GCP), automation, and Infrastructure as Code.
• Understanding of operating live systems with large user volumes.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills.
• Highly autonomous, proactive, with a strong sense of ownership and a pragmatic mindset.

Nice to have

• Experience or solid understanding of large-scale containerized environments (e.g., EKS, ECS, Fargate, GKE).
• Experience with high-throughput live systems.
• Strong SQL and database design experience.
• Experience with Linux, shell scripting, and automation.
• Knowledge of networking, security, and cloud security practices.
• Experience with Terraform or similar IaC tools.
• Familiarity with ZooKeeper or similar coordination systems.
• Prior game development experience.

Culture & Benefits

• Independent teams ("cells") and trust are core to the culture.
• Focus on creating great games by putting together the best teams with freedom and independence.
• Strong emphasis on work environment, resources, and compensation.
• Internal job titles do not include prefixes like Senior, Junior, Principal, or Director; recognition isn't tied to titles.
• Dedicated mobility team and partners support relocation for candidates and their families (human or animal).