Lead Backend Engineer

What is your role?

As the Lead Backend Engineer at Eleventh Hour Games, you will guide the technology, processes, and people behind the online services that power Last Epoch. You will serve as the primary voice for backend technology across the studio, ensuring uptime, scalability, and alignment with game and business needs. You will lead by example, driving execution, improving systems, and growing the engineers around you.

Responsibilities:

• Shape long-term goals, strategy, and the technical roadmap for the backend department
• Own integration and operational management of partners such as Nitrado, Sendbird, Azure/Cosmos, PlayFab, and others
• Maintain uptime, reliability, and performance targets through monitoring, alerting, communication, delegation, and structured maintenance
• Ensure backend scalability to support projected CCU thresholds, collaborating closely with backend ICs
• Diagnose and lead resolution of complex service, infrastructure, and live-ops issues
• Serve as the authoritative source of truth for backend technology capabilities, limitations, risks, and opportunities
• Review major technical designs, architecture proposals, and any game dev features with backend impact
• Ensure releases launch on time, with stability and minimal hotfix needs
• Contribute high-quality code and elevate engineering standards across the team
• Surface and resolve critical bugs quickly; guide the team through the hardest debugging challenges
• Lead backend engineers through 1:1s, coaching, performance management, and hiring
• Improve processes: sprint execution, feature crew coordination, documentation quality, checklists, quality gates, and cross-team dependency management

Qualifications:

• 5+ years building and supporting online services; 2+ years in a game studio preferred
• Hands-on experience with cloud providers (Azure strongly preferred).
• Strong command of C# or similar back-end language
• Experience shipping or supporting a live service with a regular release cadence
• Strong communication skills and autonomy in a remote environment
• Demonstrated ability to lead through ambiguity, anticipate problems, and raise technical standards

Pluses:

• Familiarity with multiplayer online games and ARPGs in particular
• Experience with Unity
• Experience supporting console platforms and multi-platform patching/hotfix workflows
• Experience with large-scale monitoring, alerting, or incident response tooling
• Prior people-leadership or mentorship experience

Why Eleventh Hour Games?

EHG is a fast growing studio, focused on a passion for top-down action RPGs. We value open communication, close-knit teamwork, and opportunity for ownership and growth! Our mission is to gather and empower the next generation of creators to forge extraordinary games. Extraordinary games build passionate communities, which create passionate people. Passionate people turn into next year's creators. With our breakout title Last Epoch, we are moving fast into the next round of adventure!

• Flexible fully remote working arrangement
• 35 paid time off days at the start of each year for U.S. based employees
• Dental, Vision for U.S. based employees + dependents
• 90% paid health coverage premiums for U.S. based employees and 100% premium paid for dependents health insurance
• 401K for U.S. based employees