Backend Engineer

About the role

We are seeking an experienced Backend Engineer to join our in‑office team in Irvine. You will work closely with the lead architect to design data models, API contracts, and build core services that power both our first‑party products and third‑party developers.

Key responsibilities

• Design and maintain a social graph covering users, profiles, friendships, guilds, roles, permissions and moderation, ensuring correctness under concurrency and abuse.
• Implement financial and cosmetic economy features such as currencies, balances, drops, crafting, and on‑chain asset reconciliation, with idempotent, auditable and reversible transactions.
• Build reusable social product capabilities including chat, timelines, feeds and notifications.
• Develop contract‑first, versioned APIs and evolve them with the architect for frontend, mobile and third‑party clients.
• Raise the bar by contributing to design reviews, testing, code reviews and mentoring teammates.

Required profile

• Demonstrated portfolio of serious backend work with deep technical discussions.
• Several years of experience building and operating production systems where correctness and scale are critical.
• Experience with value‑critical systems such as payments, ledgers, marketplaces or virtual economies.
• Background in building social systems like graphs, permissions, feeds, chat and moderation.
• Strong relational data modeling skills, including schema design, indexing, query optimization and live migrations.

Required skills

• Go
• SQLite
• TypeScript
• React
• WebSockets or Server‑Sent Events (SSE)
• C, C++ or Rust (or Zig)

What we offer

• Seed‑stage equity
• Learning, health and culture stipends, PTO and health insurance
• Creative studio environment within an independent, well‑capitalized company