Lead Backend Engineer

At Gardens Interactive, we're building games centered on connection, collective adventure, and emergent stories. We believe the spirit with which we build games is reflected in the experiences our players have. The way we collaborate, solve problems, navigate uncertainty, and care for one another ultimately shapes the worlds we create. We're creating magical, shared experiences that bring players together and we know those experiences come from teams that are curious, resilient, ambitious, and deeply committed to one another.

We're a fully remote studio that embraces collaboration, thoughtful iteration, and the courage to explore new ideas. If you're excited by ambiguity, enjoy solving difficult problems with kind, talented teammates, and want to help build worlds where friendships flourish, we'd love to meet you.

As our Lead Backend Engineer, you will...

Team Leadership

• Manage, mentor, and grow a team of backend engineers: set goals, run 1:1s, give feedback, and support career development.
• Create hiring plans and interview technical candidates based on product needs.
• Own team processes: planning, code review standards, on-call/bug triage, and how work gets scoped and estimated.
• Create a healthy, high-trust engineering culture at a mid-size studio scale.

Hands-on Development

• Review pull requests and unblock engineers on hard technical problems.
• Own the evolution of our backend architecture and write production code on critical-path systems.
• Own reliability, service level objectives, incident response, and infrastructure cost.

Cross-functional Collaboration

• Partner closely with game design, marketing, and production to scope features and keep engineering aligned with the creative vision.
• Partner with the Technical Director to create a realistic technical roadmap.
• Communicate engineering status, risks, and trade-offs clearly to studio leadership.

What You'll Bring

• 6+ years of professional backend experience, with games/live-service development strongly preferred.
• 2+ years of experience directly managing or leading engineers.
• Strong Kotlin or Java skills and familiarity with Kubernetes, Grafana, Terraform, and load-testing tools.
• Hands-on experience with scaling backend systems to a global audience and the debugging, monitoring, and alerting challenges that come with it.
• A solid grasp of software architecture and design patterns, and the judgment to know when to apply them versus keep things simple.
• Experience working cross-functionally with design, marketing, and production on a shipped or in-development game.
• Comfortable operating with high ownership in a lean team where you wear multiple hats.
• Strong communication skills: able to explain technical trade-offs to non-engineers and rally a small team around a plan.

Nice to Have

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

The Team

• Reports to the Technical Director.
• Leads the Backend Engineering team.
• Partners closely with the Gameplay Lead, Technical Director, Production, Design, Marketing, QA, and the broader engineering organization.

How We Work

We believe great games are built by people who care deeply about both the work and one another. Our values guide how we collaborate, solve problems, make decisions, and grow together. They're practical behaviors, not slogans, and they're part of how we hire, give feedback, and support one another every day.

We're looking for teammates who are excited to:

• Stay curious and ask thoughtful questions.
• Adapt when plans change.
• Exercise good judgment rather than chase perfection.
• Care for the success of the whole team, not just their own work.
• Pursue ambitious goals while remaining humble enough to keep learning.
• Commit fully to the shared adventure we're building together.

You'll Thrive Here If...

• You enjoy asking questions before jumping to conclusions.
• You adapt comfortably when priorities evolve.
• You balance ambition with pragmatism.
• You communicate thoughtfully and seek feedback.
• You care about helping your teammates succeed.
• You embrace uncertainty as part of creating something new.