ENGINEERING BACKEND SERVER ENGINEER (MMORPG) - GCP APR 15, 2026 VIEW DETAILS →

ENGINEERING

CONTRACT

APR 15, 2026

Soulbound, a cutting-edge indie game studio based in London, building a cross-platform MMORPG with pixel art aesthetics and browser-based access. We've built infrastructure for a single-shard game world that spins up localised regional clusters for instanced combat, delivering low-latency action RPG gameplay with the flexibility for players to play with anyone, from anywhere in the world, at any time. The game features real-time player-shared worlds, co-op dungeons, 10-player raids, player housing, questing, online and offline background crafting, auction houses, and live chat. All of it running simultaneously, all of it real-time.

The Role

We need backend engineers who can help us scale this infrastructure for launch and beyond. You'll work directly with our CTO on the systems that keep thousands of players connected, fighting, trading, and exploring in the same world simultaneously. Our backend is 60+ microservices running on Google Kubernetes Engine. Stateful game servers, event-driven architecture with Kafka, MongoDB and PostgreSQL databases, WebSocket real-time communication, and multi-cluster orchestration. The system works at current scale, your job is making it work at 10x that. This role is perfect for a passionate individual contributor eager to tackle some of the most thrilling, challenging, and distinctive problems in contemporary software development. The real-time demands of an online MMO present a one-of-a-kind opportunity, and we’re searching for the brilliant mind ready to dive into these intricate, interconnected systems.

What You’ll Do

• Build, optimise, and scale backend services powering real-time multiplayer gameplay
• Work with GKE, Helm, and Kubernetes to manage deployments and autoscaling for stateful game servers
• Improve observability: monitoring dashboards, alerting (Prometheus/Grafana or GCP Cloud Monitoring), and incident response
• Scale distributed databases (MongoDB, PostgreSQL) under high concurrent load
• Optimise Kafka event streaming for player actions, game state, and inter-service communication
• Identify and resolve bottlenecks before they become player-facing problems
• Improve resilience and prevent cascading failures across services
• Collaborate on architectural decisions with a small, senior engineering team

REQUIREMENTS

• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes (ideally GKE) in production
• Real experience scaling distributed systems under load.
• Worked with at least some of: MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Redis, pub/sub systems
• Comfortable with monitoring stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager, or equivalent)
• Infrastructure-as-code experience (Terraform, Helm)
• Self-directed.
• Github/linkedin portfolio

What Sets You Apart

• Experience with game backends or real-time multiplayer systems
• Passion for MMO gaming experiences and understanding of MMO products in the market.
• Worked with stateful server architectures (dedicated game servers)
• Experience with custom game server orchestration on Kubernetes
• Familiarity with Istio service mesh
• Previous work at a game studio, especially on live service/MMO titles
• A passion for the unique problems presented when operating a large scale MMO like this.

BENEFITS

• 100% remote, must overlap significantly with UK (GMT/BST) hours.
• Contract role, 4-8 weeks initially with extension likely post-launch
• Full-time preferred, flexible for exceptional candidates
• Competitive salary / monthly rate.
• Become a valued member of our close-knit, passionate indie team of 25.
• Play a key role in creating a groundbreaking virtual world that will captivate and welcome millions of players.

People joining can feel like it's chaos. They're not wrong. We work like a startup, fast.

We start small, ship it, player it, and build from there. If something feels wrong, we fix it now, not later.

Anyone can edit the game. Every change appears in-engine instantly, so we bias for action and build by playing.

Games are felt. So we build based on feeling.

Gamers want indie games more than ever - not just for the nostalgia, but because indie studios focus on the thing that actually matters: interesting game design. Strange loops. Big bets on mechanics nobody else is trying.

That's what we do at Spiderware. We believe in artists, designers, and engineers who love games — especially novel indie games that push the boundaries — and want to build something that doesn't already exist. We don't believe in 'doing what works'. We believe in people making games that haven't been made before.

We don't take safe bets. We trust our gut about what we'd want to play, take the parts we love from games we admire, and combine them into something entirely new.

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