Server Engineering Lead

WHAT’S THE ROLE?

We’re looking for a Server Engineering Lead to join the Elite Dangerous team and help deliver exceptional online experiences to our players. You’ll bring strong technical expertise, leadership ability, and a passion for high-quality game development.

In this role, you’ll work with Linux-based distributed systems on AWS, contribute hands-on code (primarily PHP), and collaborate closely with our in-house Cobra engine and cross-platform game code. You’ll lead and mentor a team of server developers, guiding their growth while providing technical direction across major features and systems.

You’ll also share responsibility for the performance, reliability, and cost-efficiency of our online services, working with other discipline leads to ensure we deliver smooth, scalable, and engaging experiences for our players.

This is a fantastic opportunity to join the team behind our multi-million-selling, cross-platform titles, help shape the next generation of server engineers, and contribute directly to the future of our games.

WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING

• Leading the development of major game featuresand systems
• Contributingtechnically through hands-on programming, systems administration, and wider technical responsibilities
• Managing and mentoring developers, providing feedbackand guiding them with their documentation
• Designing and implementing systems using clean, maintainable, and well-documentedcode
• Collaborating with project leadership and production to define the contents for key deliverables and milestones, and working with stakeholders to deliver the technical and creative vision for the project
• Maintainingsecure and reliable online services across cloud and on-premenvironments
• Developingand supportingtools that enable non-technical teams to create content and manage the game’s online services effectively.
• Contributingto operational incident response during core hours, with additionalparticipation in evening and weekend on-callsupport as required.

WHAT YOU’LL BRING

• Extensive experience of object-oriented programming in a dynamically typed script-based language, such as PHP, Python or Typescript
• A genuine passion for video games.
• A track recordin the development of quality high performance, high availability server systems
• Safely and confidently navigate a mature codebase, bringing clarity, structure, and engineering judgement to complex systems
• Extensive experience in developing distributed systems with open sourcecomponents such as databases, caches, firewalls, load balancersand networks.
• Experience of Linux systems administration
• Expertisein people management and leadership skills with a passion for developing individuals and teams.
• A history of handling the non-coding technical aspects of development, such as branch management, TRC analysis, bug/crash triaging, and so forth.
• A proactive approach to collaborative learning and knowledge sharing with colleagues.

BONUS IF YOU HAVE

• Experience working with a game engine, preferably having shipped a cross-platform game title that included Consoles
• Experience designing, configuringand maintainingnetworking and security systems (TCP/UDP, Routing, NAT, Firewalls, etc)
• Experience programming in compiled languages such asC++, C#, Goor Rust
• Experience scaling, performance & reliability optimisation of distributed systems
• Distributed database architectures (Relational, Document, Key/Value, Graph, etc)