Feeny
thatgamecompany

Senior Backend Engineer - China at thatgamecompany (Shanghai, China)

thatgamecompany· Shanghai, China·

Role details

Work type
Onsite
Employment
Full-Time
Level
Senior
Skills
Backend DevelopmentDistributed SystemsLinuxmacOSBash CLIPythonGoErlangC++SQLNoSQLMessage Queues

Summary

The Senior Backend Engineer leads the design and implementation of large-scale, highly available backend systems serving millions of concurrent players. Responsibilities include managing containerized stacks, monitoring system health, and ensuring zero downtime while maintaining agile development practices.

Job 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.

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!

Why work at thatgamecompany

  • Culture: The studio describes itself as “compassionate, creative” and values “integrity and personal growth within an environment of intense collaboration and experimentation.” Employee rating on LinkedIn: 4.2/5.0 (11 reviews), with Culture score 4.3, Work-Life 4.2, Compensation 4.2, Career 4.1.
  • Remote/Hybrid/Office Policy: Not explicitly stated in provided sources, but headquarters in Santa Monica, California is a physical studio. The company previously planned a second studio in SF Bay Area (cancelled due to COVID) and now operates distributed across 15 countries, suggesting flexible/remote options are possible.
  • Notable Perks & Engineering Culture: Emphasis on “making magic” and pushing artistic boundaries; tech stack includes Kubernetes, Docker, Prometheus, Protobuf, Tableau, microservices, and GitHub. Employees come from top entertainment/tech companies (Pixar, Blizzard, Riot Games, Amazon, Unity, etc.), indicating a high-caliber peer group.
  • Growth Opportunity: With 24 active job postings (including Engineering, AI, Art, Marketing, Data) and a yearly hiring trend +4.3%, the studio is expanding. Roles such as Senior Data Analyst, Senior Machine Learning Engineer, and 3D Environment Artist signal opportunities to work on flagship products.
  • Mission-driven work: Opportunity to contribute to games that aim to make a positive impact on players’ lives and expand the emotional range of the medium.

Application questions