Senior Java Backend & DevOps Engineer

We're not looking for someone who has "used CoPilot." We're looking for a Senior Java Backend & DevOps Engineer who already runs agentic workflows as a core part of how they ship - multiple Claude Code / Codex / Cursor agents in parallel, custom subagents, MCP servers, skills, planning loops, review gates - and who has opinions about which patterns actually work in production versus which ones look good in demos.

You'll bring that practice to backend systems that keep entire game worlds alive for millions of players. Always-on, low-latency, unpredictable load. Real player impact when something is off by 20 ms.

In this role you'll join Goodgame Studios - self-published MMO strategy titles, 200M+ registered players, €1B+ in lifetime revenue, part of Stillfront Group, one of Europe's leading game publishers.

THE ROLE

You own backend services end-to-end: architecture, implementation, infrastructure, deployment, production, scaling. The difference from a traditional senior role is leverage - you're expected to operate at 10-20× the throughput of a classical engineer by orchestrating agents rather than typing every line yourself. You stay the architect and the reviewer. The agents do the volume.

YOUR MISSION

• Design and operate high-throughput, low-latency Java services (JDK 17+) on AWS, K8s, Terraform, ArgoCD.
• Build resilient distributed components and tune memory, concurrency, and GC for real production workloads.
• Architect MySQL and Redis layers handling millions of player rows.
• Own CI/CD, observability, and on-call for systems you ship.
• Run an agentic workflow that holds up under code review: precise specs, tight feedback loops, generated tests, validation gates, your judgement as the final filter on architecture, security, and performance.
• Help define how the rest of the engineering org adopts agentic practices - tooling, review standards, what "done" means when an agent wrote 80% of the diff.

• 6+ years backend Java, expert level. Distributed systems, concurrency, GC tuning, SQL optimisation are second nature.
• Deep AWS and cloud-native stack (K8s, Docker, Terraform).
• A real agentic coding practice. You can talk concretely about: how you structure prompts and context for long-running tasks, when you let an agent run autonomously vs. when you intervene, how you manage multi-agent setups, what you've built with MCP / custom tools / skills, and how you review agent-generated code without becoming a bottleneck.
• Strong analytical decomposition - the ability to turn fuzzy product asks into precise constraints both humans and agents can execute against.
• Architectural judgement. You design clean, resilient systems; you don't just accept whatever the agent produces.
• Highly proficient in English.
• Seeking full-time remote roles (within Germany, valid German visa required) or Freelance opportunities within the German timezone (CET/CEST).

• Gaming backend experience (matchmaking, inventories, leaderboards, economy services).
• Event-driven architectures (Kafka, Kinesis, SQS/SNS).
• Real-time telemetry or anti-cheat systems.
• Published or shared work on agentic workflows - blog posts, OSS subagents/skills, internal tooling you've open-sourced.

• You'll work on systems players interact with every minute, at a scale where engineering decisions show up immediately in metrics.
• You'll help set the bar for what agentic engineering looks like in a 30+ person backend org that ships real products - not a lab, not a pilot.
• High autonomy. Remote within the German time zone. Engineering-first culture.
• Genuinely interesting technical surface area: Java, MySQL, Redis, AWS, distributed systems, plus the meta-problem of how to run all of it agentically without sacrificing reliability.