Senior/Lead Backend Engineer

About the role

Medal's backend powers everything from real-time in-app communications and storage of billions of user-generated clips, to our ML-based feed and social features. We're looking for a Senior or Lead Backend Engineer to help us scale and evolve this infrastructure as we grow. In this role, you'll work closely with product, infra, and data teams to architect and build highly scalable, low-latency systems. You'll help design critical APIs, evolve our backend infrastructure, mentor other engineers, and drive technical decisions that impact millions of users. If you love building resilient systems, thinking about architecture at scale, and want to work on a product that blends gaming, content, and community - this role is for you. You Will Design and develop backend systems and REST APIs that serve millions of users and billions of clips Own features end-to-end: from design and architecture through implementation and deployment Work closely with cross-functional teams across product, ML, and mobile to build cohesive experiences Scale our systems to support growth in users, content volume, and features Lead engineering projects, drive architectural decisions, and mentor junior and mid-level backend engineers Help maintain our cloud infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines Optimize databases, APIs, and services for performance, scalability, and cost Contribute to technical strategy, roadmap, and team-wide best practices You Need 5+ years of backend engineering experience, with significant time in production environments Strong proficiency in Java and hands-on experience building scalable microservices Deep understanding of RESTful API design and distributed systems Experience with relational databases like MySQL or PostgreSQL (including performance tuning and schema design) Experience building systems that handle thousands of requests per second Comfort with cloud infrastructure (GCP or AWS preferred), CI/CD , and infrastructure as code Strong grasp of system design, architectural patterns, and security best practices Strong communication and leadership skills, with the ability to drive cross-team projects Bonus Points Experience with Redis , RabbitMQ , or other message brokers and caching systems Familiarity with Terraform , Docker , Kubernetes , and modern DevOps practices Experience with observability tools and performance monitoring Exposure to ElasticSearch , BigQuery , or other data warehouse tools Contributions to open-source projects A passion for games and gaming communities Our Stack Backend: Java, Redis, RabbitMQ, Kubernetes, Terraform Cloud: Google Cloud Platform, AWS Frontend: Electron, React, Redux Native: C#, C++, Swift, Kotlin CI/CD & Infra: GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Salt, Docker