Senior Backend Engineer / DevOps Engineer

We are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer with strong DevOps expertise to join our team on a full-time or contract basis. The ideal candidate will have over five years of experience and be capable of designing, developing, and maintaining the backend infrastructure of a scalable, interactive software platform. This role demands ownership of the entire backend lifecycle—from architecture and API development to deployment, monitoring, and ongoing operations—ensuring security, reliability, and performance at every stage.

Key Responsibilities
- Design scalable and maintainable backend architecture tailored to business needs.
- Develop secure REST and/or GraphQL APIs to support various client applications.
- Create efficient database schemas and optimize data-access patterns.
- Implement robust authentication, authorization, and role-based access control mechanisms.
- Build backend services managing 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 for streamlined deployments.
- Configure and manage development, staging, and production environments.
- Containerize applications using Docker and manage cloud infrastructure deployments.
- Establish backup, disaster recovery, and database migration strategies.
- Monitor application performance and infrastructure reliability continuously.
- Securely handle secrets and credentials across environments.
- Apply infrastructure-as-code principles where appropriate.
- Conduct backend performance optimization and load testing.
- Document architecture, deployment procedures, APIs, and operational processes clearly.
- Collaborate effectively with frontend/Unity developers and product stakeholders to deliver integrated solutions.

Required Qualifications
- Proven experience 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 including JWT, OAuth 2.0, and OpenID Connect.
- Expertise in relational databases, particularly PostgreSQL, including indexing and optimization techniques.
- Familiarity with caching strategies, API security, data validation, background job processing, file/object storage, API versioning, and audit logging.
- Hands-on DevOps skills including Docker, CI/CD tools (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, or equivalents), cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), Linux server administration, and reverse proxy configuration (Nginx or similar).
- Experience with SSL/TLS setup, 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.
- Knowledge of Redis, message queues (RabbitMQ, Kafka, SQS, or equivalents), CDN and object-storage architectures.
- Background in building backend services for Unity or other game-engine clients.
- Familiarity with WebSocket or real-time communication protocols.
- Experience handling large downloadable assets or content delivery systems.
- Skills in implementing analytics pipelines and enterprise-grade role-based access control (RBAC).
- Designing multi-tenant systems, database replication, and high-availability architectures.
- Understanding of penetration testing, OWASP security guidelines, and secure architecture best practices.

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

We highly value strong architectural fundamentals, clean and maintainable code, security awareness, infrastructure ownership, thorough documentation, and a commitment to building reliable systems that scale as the product evolves.