Senior Backend Engineer - Last Epoch

About the role

Eleventh Hour Games, a fast-growing studio focused on top-down action RPGs, is looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to shape its technical direction. You will own core service architecture and scalability for gameplay-critical features such as game server hosting, matchmaking, inventories and economy, and telemetry, while keeping reliability under peak traffic and enabling rapid iteration by the wider engineering team. The role is fully remote within a global team.

Key responsibilities

• Own the architecture of core backend systems for Last Epoch: gameplay services, state/inventory services, player progression and economy workflows.
• Design and implement scalable APIs and event-driven pipelines.
• Build for high availability and performance on Azure, including data storage, caching, queues and background processing.
• Set engineering standards for C# backend development: patterns, performance, resilience, observability and security.
• Drive reliability practices: idempotency, consistency models, graceful degradation, incident response and fault handling.
• Work with game design and product to turn gameplay requirements into robust technical solutions.
• Improve code and feature velocity through reviews, architecture documentation and reusable frameworks.
• Contribute to CI/CD, automated tests, deployments, monitoring and alerting, and run books.
• Apply secure-by-default practices, define service boundaries and contracts, and optimize hot paths in C# services.
• Ensure logs, metrics and traces support debugging and set SLOs/SLAs where appropriate.
• Diagnose and lead resolution of complex service and infrastructure issues, taking part in an on-call rotation (Pager Duty).

Required profile

• 5+ years building and supporting online services with SLA requirements.
• Demonstrated experience building distributed systems and event-driven architectures.
• Experience designing systems that support real-time or near-real-time gameplay loops (sessions, lobbies, inventory updates, matchmaking).
• Experience mentoring engineers, code reviews and setting technical standards.
• Strong cross-discipline collaboration and communication skills.

Required skills

• High-performance C# and production experience on Azure, with AKS and CosmosDB.
• API design, performance tuning and operational excellence.
• Data consistency, idempotency, retries and failure modes.
• Preferred: 2+ years in a game studio, console storefront configuration, PlayFab, Nitrado/GameFabric, Unity and Unreal, PC and console performance optimization, ARPG knowledge, and GAAS experience.