Senior Server Engineer - Performance - Unannounced Project

Title: Senior Server Engineer - Performance - Unannounced Project Location: IE - Ireland

Scopely is looking for a Senior Server Engineer (Performance) to join a new truly unique multiplayer strategy game in Barcelona on a hybrid basis or remotely in the UK, Ireland, Portugal, and the rest of Spain. If you're open to working in any of these locations, there's no need to apply more than once. We'll discuss location preferences during the hiring process. We can support with visa sponsorship from any location.

At Scopely, we care deeply about what we do and want to inspire play every day - whether in our work environments alongside our talented colleagues or through our deep connections with our communities of players. We are a global team of game lovers who are developing, publishing and innovating the mobile games industry, connecting millions of people around the world daily.

We embrace AI-forward development practices and expect our engineers to be curious and pragmatic about how these tools can raise the bar.
We are in the early stages of development on an ambitious, unannounced Strategy/MMO title, creating a team of talented and passionate game makers to join us on this exciting journey!

What You Will Do  

• Work in a cross-functional agile team and be responsible for designing, developing, and evolving systems that validate and improve the performance, scalability, and reliability of backend services running on AWS
• Design and implement performance and reliability strategies for our core backend systems, including defining service-level expectations (latency, throughput, error rates) and validating them under realistic conditions
• Build frameworks and tooling to simulate real-world production scenarios, including multi-service interactions, high concurrency, and network variability
• Develop and maintain load, stress, and endurance testing systems, integrated into CI/CD pipelines to detect regressions before production
• Analyze system behavior using metrics, logs, and distributed tracing, identifying bottlenecks and driving improvements across services
• Define and drive the adoption of a comprehensive testing strategy across backend services, including unit tests, integration tests (leveraging test containers), and clear guidelines for when and how each layer should be applied
• Enable a shift-left quality culture by building tooling, patterns, and best practices that allow teams to detect regressions early
• Collaborate with feature teams to improve system design, resilience, and scalability, acting as a force multiplier across backend engineering
• Leverage AI tools and agentic workflows in your daily work — from tech planning, code generation and review to exploring novel solutions.

What We’re Looking For  

• Highly experienced as a software engineer working on backend systems, distributed systems (operating in the Public Cloud) , or other relevant areas with a strong passion for testing and performance testing
• Professional experience building and operating highly available, scalable backend systems, such as MMO game servers, high-traffic services, or real-time applications
• Experience with Python and its ecosystem, including familiarity with asynchronous programming, concurrency, and performance considerations
• Solid understanding of distributed systems, including:
• service-to-service communication, including event driven architectures
• failure modes and resilience patterns
• stateful vs stateless architectures
• Experience designing and implementing highly scalable and low-latency systems, including use of Redis, DynamoDB, or similar technologies
• Strong understanding of API design (REST/gRPC) and ability to write efficient, low-latency code
• Experience working in cloud environments (AWS) and familiarity with containerized deployments (Docker)
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and infrastructure automation
• Experience using observability tools (Datadog, logs, tracing) to analyze and debug system behavior
• Hands-on experience working with AI-assisted development tools (e.g. GitHub Copilot, Codex, Claude Code) and an understanding of how agentic workflows can augment engineering productivity.

Bonus Points

• Experience with load testing frameworks like K6, Locust
• Understanding of SRE concepts like: SLA, SLO, error budgets
• Experience with load testing messaging systems such as NATS;
• Experience with relational databases likeMySQL.
• Familiarity with Infrastructure-as-Code (preferred Terraform) for managing infrastructure deployment
• Understanding of network infrastructure and cloud networking concepts, such as VPC, Subnet, Security Groups, and Load Balancing
• Understanding modern observability stacks like  Kibana / Datadog to perform log querying and dashboards