Senior Backend Engineer / DevOps Engineer

We are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer with strong DevOps skills to join our team on a full-time or contract basis. The ideal candidate will have over five years of experience designing and maintaining scalable backend infrastructure for interactive software platforms. This role involves full ownership of backend architecture, API development, database design, security, cloud infrastructure, deployment pipelines, monitoring, and ensuring production reliability. The candidate should be capable of managing the entire backend lifecycle, from initial architecture through deployment and ongoing operations.

Key Responsibilities
Design and develop scalable, maintainable backend architectures that support secure REST and/or GraphQL APIs. Create efficient database schemas and data-access patterns while implementing robust authentication, authorization, and role-based access controls. Build backend services to manage user accounts, application data, configuration, content, analytics, and administrative functions. Ensure secure communication between backend services and client applications.

Implement comprehensive logging, monitoring, error tracking, and observability solutions. Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines and configure development, staging, and production environments. Containerize applications using Docker and deploy cloud infrastructure with a focus on reliability and security. Establish backup, disaster recovery, and database migration strategies. Monitor application performance and infrastructure health continuously.

Manage secure handling of secrets and credentials and implement infrastructure-as-code where appropriate. Perform backend performance optimization and load testing. Document architecture, deployment procedures, APIs, and operational processes thoroughly. Collaborate closely with frontend and Unity developers as well as product stakeholders to ensure alignment and smooth delivery.

Required Qualifications
Proven expertise with at least one modern backend technology stack such as Node.js/NestJS, .NET/ASP.NET Core, Python/FastAPI/Django, Java/Spring Boot, or Go. Strong knowledge of REST APIs, authentication and authorization protocols (JWT, OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect), relational databases (especially PostgreSQL), database indexing and optimization, caching strategies, API security, data validation, background job processing, file/object storage, API versioning, and logging/audit trails.

Hands-on experience with DevOps tools and practices including Docker, CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, or equivalent), cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), Linux server administration, reverse proxies like Nginx, SSL/TLS configuration, secrets management, monitoring and alerting systems, centralized logging, automated deployments, environment management, and infrastructure security.

Preferred Qualifications and Benefits
Experience with Kubernetes and Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Terraform is highly desirable. Familiarity with Redis, message queues (RabbitMQ, Kafka, SQS, or equivalents), CDN and object-storage architectures, and building backend services for Unity or other game-engine clients is a plus. Knowledge of WebSocket or real-time communication technologies, handling large downloadable assets or content-delivery systems, and implementing analytics pipelines will be advantageous.

Additional preferred skills include enterprise-grade role-based access control (RBAC), multi-tenant system design, database replication, high-availability setups, penetration testing, OWASP security guidelines, and secure architecture best practices.

Engineering Expectations
The candidate should be comfortable making architectural decisions focused on scalability, security, availability, performance, database and API architecture, cloud cost optimization, deployment strategies, monitoring, backup and recovery, and maintaining clear separation between development, staging, and production environments.

We value strong architecture fundamentals, clean and maintainable code, security awareness, infrastructure ownership, thorough documentation, and the ability to build reliable systems that scale as the product evolves.