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Salary
≈ $31k – $91k per year (Estimated)
Location
In office (Shanghai)
Seniority
Senior · 5+ years exp
Employment
Full-Time

Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Nov 5, 2026. First seen by Alion on Sep 6, 2024. thatgamecompany scores B on the Alion truth index.

Overview
Company
Impact
Profile match
thatgamecompany is an independent video game studio headquartered in Santa Monica, California, known for the artistic, emotionally driven games flOw, Flower and Journey and the free-to-play social adventure Sky: Children of the Light. Founded in 2006 by Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago, it also runs a large studio in Shanghai, has had its work enter the Smithsonian permanent collection and in 2026 launched the publishing label thatgamepublisher. It hires game engine, graphics, gameplay, build and systems engineers, technical designers, character artists, producers, data analysts and brand, community and social media marketers, including interns in China, Japan and Vietnam.

Sky has an amazing and vibrant community of socially minded players, and we are tirelessly working on solutions to deepen player interaction and create lasting friendships. We are seeking an experienced Senior Backend Engineer to work on large-scale, highly available backend systems that serve thousands to millions of concurrent players and aim for zero downtime.

Responsibilities:

  • Lead the engineering work in your expertise areas. Share knowledge with other team members, set up best engineering practices, and control code quality through reviews. Design and implement large-scale, highly available backend systems that serve thousands to millions of concurrent players and aim for zero downtime.

  • Embrace modern container and cluster management technology to make our backend stack more elastic and robust.

  • Improve and maintain an agile and reliable development environment for the backend stack, so that people with different skillsets in the company can do social experiments easily, and new hires can ramp up quickly.

  • Monitor the backend health and respond to any failures or glitches to deliver a smooth online experience to players worldwide; keep improving dev-ops tools to make the job more automatic and error-proof.

Qualifications:

  • Have deep passion and thoughts for video games; be a gamer and think on behalf of players.

  • Be comfortable taking risks and accomplish engineering achievements that no one else has done.

  • Enjoy working with fast-moving and rapidly-growing small teams.

    Required Skills

  • 5+ year or more experience in backend development and deployment in a production environment.

  • Have a thorough understanding of scalable and highly available backend systems; be familiar with open-source distributed system tech stacks, including but not limited to scalable databases, caching strategy, distributed transactions, and dev-ops tools.

  • Be able to extract useful information from different sources of logs, find correlations between multiple layers of systems, and diagnose failures, suspicious behaviors, and performance bottlenecks from bottom to top.

  • Be comfortable working with the Linux ecosystem; be fluent in Linux or macOS bash CLI tools and Python scripting.

  • Have deep knowledge of at least one of Go, Erlang, or C++.

  • Have deep knowledge of at least one SQL and one NoSQL database. Have deep knowledge of at least one distributed message queue system.

  • Eager to learn any new technology and always open to jumping out of your comfort zone. Experienced in managing production environments on Cloud provider service.

  • Capable of understanding English documentation. Fluent in written English for technical

  • communications in chat tools. Be able to speak English for daily life. Fluent in spoken English for professional communications.

  • Experienced in building systems that involve eventually or strongly consistent distributed transactions.

Preferred Skills

  • Any of the following would be highly preferred, but most of all, we value engineers who are eager to learn new ways to deliver value to players:

  • Deep understanding of Go, track the newest trend of language. Managed and maintained production environment on AWS or GCP. Deployed services in Kubernetes with CI/CD tools.

  • Experienced in schema design and performance tweaking of MongoDB, PostgresSQL and Redis.

  • Experienced NATS and Kafka development

We look forward to meeting you!

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