Lead Backend Engineer

Position Summary

Our backend is a Scala / Play Framework platform built on Akka clustering and MongoDB, running real-time multiplayer casino gameplay, promotions, sweepstakes mechanics, and payment processing across three live products. The Lead Backend Engineer takes ownership of these systems end-to-end: the real-time gameplay layer, the payment and compliance surface, and the backend infrastructure shared across all three products.

This is an ownership role, not a maintenance role. The expectation is architectural and operational leadership across a large, mature, multi-product codebase — not just delivery against a backlog. Concretely: this person is expected to decide what the system should do next and why, not only implement what a backlog already specifies — setting technical direction, making calls that trade off correctness, complexity, and risk in ways no ticket fully captures, and being accountable for the health of the system as a whole, not just the tickets closed against it.

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.

Required Qualifications

• 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.

Preferred Qualifications

• 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.