Senior Backend Engineer (Optimus Team)

Description

Papaya is a leading skill-based mobile gaming company, bringing together fun, competition, and real rewards for millions of players worldwide.

Driven by our vision to create one of the world’s most exciting player communities, we develop games powered by a large-scale B2C platform that supports tens of millions of daily tournaments and connects players around the world through social competitions.

Located in the heart of Tel Aviv, we offer a fast-moving environment, culture of innovation, professional growth, and the opportunity to make a true impact.

About the Team

Optimus is the backbone of Papaya's product: we build and run the core infrastructure behind nearly every player-facing feature, at the scale of millions of players and tens of millions of daily tournaments.

What we own:

• The core product platform: shared backend services every squad builds on, built for high throughput and low latency.
• Live configuration and experimentation: A/B testing, targeting and real-time tuning for every feature.
• Scale, reliability and cost: keeping the platform fast, stable and cost-efficient as it grows.

We also own Optimus, our internal back-office tool, which the whole company uses to run games and features live. We are a senior, high-ownership team that sets technical standards, partners with every product squad, Client (Unity), Product and BI, and leads in AI-assisted development.

Responsibilities

You'll design, build and own the infrastructure behind Papaya's games and features, and set technical direction for shared platform services. You'll make our systems scale better and cost less, handling heavy API traffic and request spikes when new events go live.

Responsibilities

• Build and own high-scale backend infrastructure that powers most of our products.
• Lead solutions end to end, from challenging requirements through design and production to measuring results.
• Drive architecture decisions and mentor developers through design and code reviews.
• Own your systems in production: actionable alerts, incident investigations and root-cause analysis.
• Build with AI every day using Claude Code and our internal agent tooling, and help shape the team's shared skills, connectors and agent workflows.
• Evaluate and adopt new technologies and frameworks where they fit.
• Tech stack: AWS, Kubernetes, Node.js, TypeScript, Redis, MySQL

Requirements

• 4+ years of hands-on experience designing and building complex server applications.
• Proven experience operating high-load systems in production.
• B.Sc. in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• Strong hands-on experience with a major cloud provider (AWS, GCP or Azure).
• Backend experience in Node.js, Java or C#.
• Solid grasp of data modeling and caching (MySQL, Redis).
• A drive to adopt cutting-edge technologies for complex engineering challenges.
• A proactive, problem-solving mindset and a high bar for production-ready code.
• Hands-on use of AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot or similar) in real production work, not just autocomplete. You know how to break down tasks, give the agent context and verify its output.

Advantages

• Extensive experience with high-scale, high-throughput distributed systems.
• Experience building platform services for other engineering teams.
• Background in mobile gaming or large-scale B2C mobile platforms.
• Data-driven product work: A/B tests, BI, SQL analytics (e.g. Snowflake).
• Knowledge of client-side development in C# (e.g. Unity).