{"id":676732,"url":"https://alion.io/job/thatgamecompany-senior-backend-engineer-china","title":"Senior Backend Engineer - China","company":{"id":7044,"name":"thatgamecompany","domain":"thatgamecompany.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/thatgamecompany","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":79,"open_postings":33,"ghost_share":0.273,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":70,"computed_at":"2026-11-05T05:54:30Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":["Shanghai, China"],"countries":["CN"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":31000,"max_usd":91000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":52},"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"Erlang","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"Linux","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":true},{"name":"AWS","optional":true},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":true},{"name":"GCP","optional":true},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":true},{"name":"NATS","optional":true},{"name":"Redis","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2024-09-06T14:29:35Z","employer_posted_date":"2024-09-06","last_verified_at":"2026-11-05T06:27:43Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":789,"trust":{"level":"ghost","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale","company_stale"],"days_open":789},"description":"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.\nResponsibilities:\nLead 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.\n\nEmbrace modern container and cluster management technology to make our backend stack more elastic and robust.\n\nImprove 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.\n\nMonitor 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.\n\nQualifications:\nHave deep passion and thoughts for video games; be a gamer and think on behalf of players.\n\nBe comfortable taking risks and accomplish engineering achievements that no one else has done.\n\nEnjoy working with fast-moving and rapidly-growing small teams.\nRequired Skills\n\n5+ year or more experience in backend development and deployment in a production environment.\n\nHave 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.\n\nBe 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.\n\nBe comfortable working with the Linux ecosystem; be fluent in Linux or macOS bash CLI tools and Python scripting.\n\nHave deep knowledge of at least one of Go, Erlang, or C++.\n\nHave deep knowledge of at least one SQL and one NoSQL database. Have deep knowledge of at least one distributed message queue system.\n\nEager to learn any new technology and always open to jumping out of your comfort zone. Experienced in managing production environments on Cloud provider service.\n\nCapable of understanding English documentation. Fluent in written English for technical\n\ncommunications in chat tools. Be able to speak English for daily life. Fluent in spoken English for professional communications.\n\nExperienced in building systems that involve eventually or strongly consistent distributed transactions.\n\nPreferred Skills\nAny 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:\n\nDeep 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.\n\nExperienced in schema design and performance tweaking of MongoDB, PostgresSQL and Redis.\n\nExperienced NATS and Kafka development\n\nWe look forward to meeting you!","description_format":"text","description_chars":3382,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":5,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[{"language":"English","level":"All levels","optional":false}]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"China","iso":"CN","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Gaming"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-10T22:57:22Z"},{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-25T15:16:23Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":8,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.286,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":789,"expected_fill_days":70,"reasons":["conf:4","ghost","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-11-05T05:54:30Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/thatgamecompany-senior-backend-engineer-china","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/thatgamecompany-senior-backend-engineer-china.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-05T07:25:36Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":9485,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-06T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":7044},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=7044"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fthatgamecompany-senior-backend-engineer-china"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fthatgamecompany-senior-backend-engineer-china"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fthatgamecompany-senior-backend-engineer-china"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/thatgamecompany-senior-backend-engineer-china\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fthatgamecompany-senior-backend-engineer-china"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":676732}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"thatgamecompany.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":676732},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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