Remote Position
[Remote] Lead Backend Engineer
🌍 Remote · United States
💼 Full-time
Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Blitzoo is hiring a Lead Backend Engineer to own the backend systems supporting three live real-time multiplayer casino products. The role provides architectural and operational leadership across gameplay, payments, compliance, shared infrastructure, production health, and technical mentorship.
Responsibilities
- System ownership. Hold end-to-end technical ownership of the backend across all major service domains: game logic, promotions, payments, sweepstakes, player accounts, admin/backoffice, and analytics
- Real-time architecture. Lead design and evolution of the WebSocket / Akka-actor-based real-time gameplay layer and the Akka cluster it runs on
- Payments & compliance. Own integration correctness for Paysafe, WorldPay (including 3DS flows), Apple StoreKit, and Google Play billing, in coordination with legal/compliance on regulatory requirements for sweepstakes-model gaming
- Shared infrastructure stewardship. Make and review changes to backend infrastructure shared across all three casino gaming products, with awareness of cross-product impact
- Operational leadership. Own production health for a live, revenue-generating system: deploys, cluster operations, incident response, and postmortems
- Technical mentorship. Set technical direction, run code review, and raise the engineering judgment bar for the team working in this codebase
- Knowledge continuity. Absorb knowledge transfer from the outgoing lead — primarily through prepared written documentation, with live overlap only to the extent hiring completes before their departure — and become the system's primary technical authority
Skills
- 7+ years professional backend engineering experience, with real ownership (not just contribution) of a production system at meaningful scale
- Strong Scala experience — functional style, not incidental Scala syntax on top of Java habits — ideally with Play Framework or a comparable typed functional web framework
- Production experience with an actor-model or comparable distributed-systems framework (Akka, Erlang/OTP, or similar), including cluster operation, not just local single-node usage
- Experience with async/reactive database access patterns (ReactiveMongo or equivalent reactive-driver experience)
- Demonstrated ownership of at least one payment, billing, or other compliance-sensitive integration in production
- Strong distributed-systems judgment: can reason about race conditions, idempotency under retry/duplicate delivery, and compatibility across a rolling deploy without being prompted
- Experience in iGaming, sweepstakes, or other regulated real-money gaming
- Experience with real-time, low-latency, or WebSocket-heavy backend systems
- Experience maintaining and evolving a legacy codebase (10+ years) without a rewrite
- Experience with MongoDB operations beyond query-writing — indexing strategy, replica set behavior under load
Company Overview