Senior Software Engineer

Location: Remote, UK/ Lisbon, EU
Reporting to: Lead Software/ Backend Engineer 

Salary: £75k-£100k per annum

Contract: Full time, Permanent

Company Overview 
At Lockwood, our vision is to bring people together through Avakin Life, where players can play, share, and socialize in one of the world's largest and most populous metaverses. Avakin Life provides an immersive 3D life simulation experience for millions of users worldwide. 

With a focus on innovation and collaboration, Lockwood offers a flexible and creative environment that empowers our teams to push the boundaries of what’s possible. We provide competitive benefits, including an employee share scheme, making Lockwood an exciting destination for those passionate about shaping the future of digital experiences. This position is available as a fully remote role, though there may be occasional meetups for social interaction and strategic sessions. 

Role Summary 
We are looking for an individual eager to be part of our backend team building and scaling the systems that power Avakin Life, ensuring the platform continues to deliver an outstanding experience for millions of players. You will play a crucial role in ensuring the team collaborate and effectively build scalable, reliable, and secure backend systems that support our mission to create an unparalleled social gaming experience. 

Key Responsibilities 

• Collaborate with teams across Lockwood to identify necessary functionality and efficiency improvements and to determine the correct solution. 

• Work collaboratively within the cross-functional team to deliver maximum value in an agile environment. 

• Take on new technical skillsets as the role requires. 

• Manage risk through a dev-ops culture and thorough testing, maintaining high quality. 

• Analyse the system for issues and resolve as priority dictates. 

• Continuously improve the development and planning process. 

• Understand what is valuable to the company, and how work relates to that. 

• Take ownership of the system produced. 

• Contribute to a strong team sense of identity and spirit. 

• Foster a learning culture within the team. 

• Work within best practices for secure, compliant, and reliable systems. 

Essential: 

• 5+ years experience in software engineering 

• Professional understanding of agile concepts and processes 

• Good knowledge of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) 

• Solid grasp of dev-ops concepts and processes 

• Effective time management and estimation skills 

• Excellent communication skills 

• Self-motivated in work and willing to learn new skills. 

• Ability to adapt to change with resilience. 

• Understanding of back-end development best practices 

• Strong expertise in backend development primarily in Golang, and languages such as Java, Python, Node.js, or C# 

• Deep understanding of microservices architecture, event-driven systems, and distributed computing 

• Proficiency in cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and containerization tools (Docker). 

• Advanced knowledge of SQL and NoSQL databases. 

• Strong background in designing scalable, high-performance systems. 

Desirable:

• Experience in the gaming industry or large-scale interactive systems. 

• Familiarity with messaging systems such as Kafka, RabbitMQ or similar 

• Proficiency with monitoring tools like Prometheus, Grafana, or ELK Stack 

• Experience with AI/ML integration in backend systems. 

At Lockwood, you’ll be part of an inclusive, creative, and highly motivated team. You’ll work on systems used by millions of players, shaping the live game experience and ensuring we can deliver new content and events rapidly and reliably. This is your opportunity to make a real impact—not just on our games, but on the future of how we operate. 

• Private Healthcare Plan
• Pension Plan
• Life Assurance
• Work From Home
• Training & Development
• Employee Assistance Programme