Engineering Lead, Goodgame Empire

Stack

Responsibilities

• ▹Lead engineering across backend and frontend: set technical direction, own delivery end-to-end, grow the team through mentoring and reviews
• ▹Translate fuzzy business requirements into precise technical solutions that both humans and agents can execute
• ▹Design and operate high-throughput, low-latency Java services (JDK 17+) on AWS, K8s, Terraform and ArgoCD, with MySQL and Redis layers
• ▹Oversee the game frontend (HTML5, Adobe AIR / Unity): guide the architecture, review the work, keep it coherent with the backend
• ▹Own CI/CD, observability and on-call for what your team ships
• ▹Define how the org adopts agentic practices: tooling, review standards and what done means when an agent wrote most of the diff

Requirements

• ▹Proven experience leading engineers (engineering lead, tech lead or similar), accountable for a team's output
• ▹6+ years of backend Java, expert level
• ▹Distributed systems, concurrency, GC tuning and SQL optimisation are second nature
• ▹Deep AWS / cloud-native stack (K8s, Docker, Terraform)
• ▹Enough frontend/game-client fluency to lead it credibly and hold a real architectural conversation with Adobe AIR / Unity engineers
• ▹Architectural judgement: design clean, resilient systems
• ▹Excellent written English
• ▹Availability in German time zone (CET/CEST)
• ▹At minimum: genuinely excited about AI-assisted engineering and already using it daily

Nice to have

• ▹Hands-on Adobe AIR and/or Unity experience (built or shipped game-client code yourself)
• ▹Gaming backend experience (matchmaking, inventories, leaderboards, economy services)
• ▹Event-driven architectures (Kafka, Kinesis, SQS/SNS); real-time telemetry or anti-cheat
• ▹Published work on agentic workflows (blog posts, OSS subagents/skills, internal tooling)
• ▹A real agentic coding practice you can talk about concretely

Soft skills

What we offer

• ▹Full autonomy over your AI stack, no mandated tools
• ▹AI-first from the top down
• ▹Own the whole stack, with strong specialists on both sides
• ▹Immediate feedback: players touch the systems every minute and decisions show up in metrics the same day

About the company

Goodgame Studios is a studio with over 200 million registered players and over €1B in lifetime revenue, a strategic core of Stillfront's portfolio. The Empire Family comprises two titles that have been live for over a decade and are consistently profitable.