Engineering Lead - Goodgame Empire
On-siteHamburg, Hamburg, Germany
Job Summary
Lead engineering across backend and frontend for Goodgame Empire and Empire: Four Kingdoms, translating fuzzy business requirements into precise technical solutions for millions of players. Design and operate high-throughput, low-latency Java services on AWS, K8s, and Terraform, while overseeing HTML5 and Unity frontend architecture. Define agentic engineering practices, orchestrate AI agents for volume throughput, and maintain CI/CD, observability, and on-call rotation. Mentor the team to raise architectural standards without stepping away from code. Own delivery end-to-end for the flagship MMO franchise with €1B+ lifetime revenue.
Required Qualifications
- Proven experience leading engineers (engineering lead, tech lead, or similar), accountable for a team's output, not just your own.
- 6+ years backend Java, expert level.
- Distributed systems, concurrency, GC tuning, and SQL optimisation are second nature.
- Deep AWS / cloud-native stack (K8s, Docker, Terraform).
- Enough frontend/game-client fluency to lead it credibly and hold a real architectural conversation with Adobe AIR / Unity engineers.
- Architectural judgement: you design clean, resilient systems, you don't just accept what the agent produces.
- Excellent written English.
- Availability in German time zone (CET/CEST).
- At minimum: genuinely excited about AI-assisted engineering and already using it daily.
Desired Qualifications
- Hands-on Adobe AIR and/or Unity experience (built or shipped game-client code yourself).
- Gaming backend experience (matchmaking, inventories, leaderboards, economy services).
- Event-driven architectures (Kafka, Kinesis, SQS/SNS); real-time telemetry or anti-cheat.
- Published work on agentic workflows (blog posts, OSS subagents/skills, internal tooling).
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