Backend Server Engineer (MMORPG) - GCP

Soulbound, a cutting-edge indie game studio based in London, building a cross-platform MMORPG with pixel art aesthetics and browser-based access. We've built infrastructure for a single-shard game world that spins up localised regional clusters for instanced combat, delivering low-latency action RPG gameplay with the flexibility for players to play with anyone, from anywhere in the world, at any time. The game features real-time player-shared worlds, co-op dungeons, 10-player raids, player housing, questing, online and offline background crafting, auction houses, and live chat. All of it running simultaneously, all of it real-time. The Role We need backend engineers who can help us scale this infrastructure for launch and beyond. You'll work directly with our CTO on the systems that keep thousands of players connected, fighting, trading, and exploring in the same world simultaneously. Our backend is 60+ microservices running on Google Kubernetes Engine. Stateful game servers, event-driven architecture with Kafka, MongoDB and PostgreSQL databases, WebSocket real-time communication, and multi-cluster orchestration. The system works at current scale, your job is making it work at 10x that. This role is perfect for a passionate individual contributor eager to tackle some of the most thrilling, challenging, and distinctive problems in contemporary software development. The real-time demands of an online MMO present a one-of-a-kind opportunity, and we’re searching for the brilliant mind ready to dive into these intricate, interconnected systems. What You'll Do Build, optimise, and scale backend services powering real-time multiplayer gameplay Work with GKE, Helm, and Kubernetes to manage deployments and autoscaling for stateful game servers Improve observability: monitoring dashboards, alerting (Prometheus/Grafana or GCP Cloud Monitoring), and incident response Scale distributed databases (MongoDB, PostgreSQL) under high concurrent load Optimise Kafka event streaming for player actions, game state, and inter-service communication Identify and resolve bottlenecks before they become player-facing problems Improve resilience and prevent cascading failures across services Collaborate on architectural decisions with a small, senior engineering team