Staff Software Architect (Gamedev)

TL;DR

Staff Software Architect (Gamedev): Designing and building scalable backend systems and APIs for live games with an accent on high-availability, AWS infrastructure, and AI integration. Focus on implementing critical paths, optimizing application performance, and establishing engineering standards for a remote-first indie studio.

Location: Remote within British Columbia, Canada. Must be legally eligible to work in Canada.

Salary: $140,000 - $200,000 CAD

Company

hirify.global is an independent gaming studio that has released twelve titles with over 35 million downloads and nearly $100M in sales.

What you will do

• Design and build high-scale backend systems, services, and APIs for live games, writing production code regularly.
• Lead the integration of LLMs and Generative AI into game loops and internal tooling, including building scaffolding for AI-driven features.
• Own critical architectural decisions regarding data modeling, service boundaries, caching strategies, and async processing.
• Establish and evolve engineering standards for CI/CD pipelines, security controls, and dependency management.
• Mentor Tech Leads and senior engineers through design reviews and direct technical feedback.
• Manage FinOps by monitoring cloud spend and overseeing the SR&ED engineering process.

Requirements

• 10+ years in software engineering, with at least 3 years as a hands-on staff/principal-level IC.
• Must be based in British Columbia, Canada and legally eligible to work in the country.
• Deep experience with high-availability, high-throughput consumer-facing systems.
• Strong AWS background (IAM, VPC, ECS/Fargate, S3, KMS) and proficiency in Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform or CDK).
• Proven experience integrating AI/ML into production environments (e.g., OpenAI API, LangChain, or vector databases).
• Strong knowledge of SRE fundamentals (SLOs, incident management) and observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog).

Nice to have

• Experience with Unity, HTML5/JavaScript, and/or PHP game platforms.
• Production experience with MongoDB and/or MySQL at scale.
• Background in gaming, live-service products, or other high-engagement consumer apps.
• Prior experience with FinOps or running SR&ED R&D incentive programs.

Culture & Benefits

• Uncapped profit share program.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision benefits.
• 3 weeks starting vacation and a paid holiday shutdown in December.
• 12 paid Care Days per year and a yearly Continuous Improvement allowance.
• Remote-first work environment with minimal in-person requirements (2-6 times per year).