**This is an opportunity to work for a remote-first company. Only applicants living in British Columbia will be considered for the role. Must be legally eligible to work in Canada.**

Our Values

Driven by PLAYER OBSESSION, we earn our players’ trust by understanding their needs and creating experiences that put them first.

OWNERSHIP means we take responsibility for our work and outcomes; we follow through, learn from mistakes, and never say “that’s not my job.”

With RESOURCEFULNESS, we do more with less, finding creative ways to overcome challenges and deliver impactful results.

Grounded in CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT, we are relentless in our pursuit of better; for ourselves, our games, and our players.

The Opportunity

We’re looking for a hands-on architect who designs systems AND builds them. You’ll spend roughly 60% of your time in the codebase—writing code, reviewing pull requests, prototyping solutions—and 40% setting architectural direction, mentoring senior engineers, and driving engineering standards. If your last few years have been mostly meetings, slide decks, and delegation, this isn’t the right fit. If you love going deep on hard problems and making an entire engineering org better through your craft, read on.

Location: Remote within British Columbia, Canada

What This Role Actually Looks Like

You’ll be the most senior technical IC in the studio, reporting to the President. There is no large platform team beneath you—you’ll have engineering partners, but the expectation is that you personally do the deep technical work, not just point at it.

Primary Focus (~60% — Hands-On)

•   Design and build backend systems, services, and APIs that support our live games at scale. You write production code regularly.
•   Own system architecture decisions—data modeling, service boundaries, caching strategies, async processing—and implement the critical paths yourself.
•   Drive code quality through hands-on code review, pairing with senior engineers, and establishing patterns that the team adopts because they’re clearly better.
•   Improve application performance: profile bottlenecks, optimize queries, reduce latency. Prove it with data, not decks.
•   Lead the integration of LLMs and Generative AI into our game loops and internal tooling. Build the scaffolding for AI-driven features (e.g., dynamic content, automated moderation, or player support agents).
•   Build and improve observability—structured logging, metrics, traces, error monitoring—so the team can debug fast and ship with confidence.
•   Leverage AI tools (code assist, test generation, automated triage) to accelerate your own work and set the example for the team.

Secondary Focus (~40% — Technical Leadership)

•   Set and evolve engineering standards: CI/CD pipelines, branching strategy, quality gates, dependency management, and security controls. You’ll configure these, not just mandate them.
•   Mentor Tech Leads and senior engineers through design reviews, architecture discussions, and direct feedback on their work. Build a culture of clear ownership and shipping.
•   Act as the studio’s technical conscience on security and privacy—staying ahead of platform requirements, driving improvements pragmatically, and being the accountable point person.
•   Define SLOs, error budgets, and on-call expectations. Lead incident response when things break and drive post-incident reviews that result in durable fixes.
•   Partner with Product, Finance, and Legal to keep technical plans aligned with business goals. Translate engineering trade-offs into business language.
•   Own the SR&ED engineering process—eligibility gates in Jira, contemporaneous notes, artifact capture—partnering with Finance on claims.
•   Champion FinOps: monitor cloud spend, right-size infrastructure, and report on cost vs. performance. 
•   Define the studio’s roadmap for AI adoption. Evaluate third-party AI vendors vs. self-hosted models, balancing cost, privacy, and performance.

What You Bring

Must-Haves

•   10+ years in software engineering, with at least 3 years as a staff/principal-level IC who stayed hands-on
•   Recent, demonstrable production coding—you can point to systems you personally designed AND built in the last 2 years
•   Deep experience with high-availability, high-throughput consumer-facing systems
•   Strong AWS background (IAM, VPC, ECS/Fargate, S3, KMS, and security tooling like GuardDuty, Security Hub, CloudTrail)
•   Infrastructure-as-code proficiency (Terraform or CDK) and CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions or equivalent)
•   Experience owning security and privacy posture in a platform-reviewed environment
•   SRE fundamentals: SLOs, incident management, load testing, graceful degradation
•   Data architecture across relational and non-relational systems
•   Observability stack experience (e.g., Graylog, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana, Datadog, Sentry)
•   Production experience using AI to accelerate development and operations
•   Clear communicator who can influence across product, engineering, legal, and finance without positional authority
•   Proven experience integrating AI/ML into production environments (e.g., working with OpenAI API, LangChain, or vector databases).

Nice-to-Haves

•   Unity, HTML5/JavaScript, and/or PHP game platform experience
•   MongoDB and/or MySQL in production at scale
•   Prior FinOps responsibility and vendor negotiations
•   Experience running SR&ED or similar R&D incentive programs
•   Background in gaming, live-service products, or other high-engagement consumer apps

A Note on Fit

This is not a DevOps/SRE role, a people-management role, or an “architect” role where you draw diagrams and hand them to someone else to build. Day-to-day infrastructure and tooling ownership is supported by an Operations team. You’re the person who makes the whole engineering org technically better by doing excellent work yourself and raising the bar for everyone around you. We’re a small, profitable indie studio—you won’t have a large team to delegate to, and that’s the point. Your leverage comes from your craft, your judgment, and your ability to multiply the people around you.

Salary

($140,000 - $200,000)

The listed pay range reflects the potential earnings for this role. Actual compensation will depend on experience, skills, and alignment with company needs, typically falling toward the midpoint for most candidates

**This is an opportunity to work for a remote-first company. Only applicants living in British Columbia will be considered for the role. Must be legally eligible to work in Canada.**

Our Values

Driven by PLAYER OBSESSION, we earn our players’ trust by understanding their needs and creating experiences that put them first.

OWNERSHIP means we take responsibility for our work and outcomes; we follow through, learn from mistakes, and never say “that’s not my job.”

With RESOURCEFULNESS, we do more with less, finding creative ways to overcome challenges and deliver impactful results.

Grounded in CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT, we are relentless in our pursuit of better; for ourselves, our games, and our players.

The Opportunity: 

• Collaborate with the development team to design and implement game features and mechanics.
• Develop and maintain complex game logic, backend systems, and server-side functionalities using PHP.
• Actively utilize and experiment with AI tools (Claude, Codex, Cursor, LLMs) to accelerate refactoring, optimize legacy code, and increase development velocity.
• Ensure high-quality code through code reviews, testing, and debugging.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to define technical requirements and project milestones.
• Optimize data architecture and performance across both MongoDB and MySQL environments.
• Optimize game performance for various platforms and devices.
• Work closely with the design team to bring their ideas to life in the game.
• Stay updated with industry trends, technologies, and AI-assisted engineering to improve game development processes.

• Minimum 3 years of full-stack experience, and knowledge with PHP, Javascript, HTML, and CSS.
• A proven track record of embracing Artificial Intelligence tools (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, LLMs) to enhance your development workflow and code quality.
• Familiar with MongoDB and/or mySQL.
• Strong understanding of object-oriented design principles.
• Solid understanding of web development strategies.
• Ability to work effectively in a collaborative team environment.
• A passion for game development with excellent problem-solving and communication skills.
• A bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field

Salary Range:

• $85,000 - $102,000 / year

The listed pay range reflects the potential earnings for this role. Actual compensation will depend on experience, skills, and alignment with company needs, typically falling toward the midpoint for most candidates

**This is an opportunity to work for a remote-first company. Only applicants living in British Columbia will be considered for the role. Must be legally eligible to work in Canada.**

Our Values

Driven by PLAYER OBSESSION, we earn our players’ trust by understanding their needs and creating experiences that put them first.

OWNERSHIP means we take responsibility for our work and outcomes — we follow through, learn from mistakes, and never say “that’s not my job.”

With RESOURCEFULNESS, we do more with less, finding creative ways to overcome challenges and deliver impactful results.

Grounded in CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT, we are relentless in our pursuit of better — for ourselves, our games, and our players.

The Opportunity

Kano (https://www.kano.ca/) is looking for a talented, passionate, and experienced Senior Developer to join our Xwars Team. You will be instrumental in building, delivering, and scaling high-volume social and mobile gaming experiences, ensuring performance and stability for millions of players worldwide.

What You’ll Do:

• Full-Stack Development & Delivery: Design, implement, test, deploy, and maintain robust, high-availability, large-scale social and mobile game features in a fast-paced, agile development environment (Kanban/Scrum).
• Performance Optimization: Take ownership of game performance optimization, dealing with issues like profiling, memory, CPU, and load times to ensure an amazing experience across millions of devices.
• Infrastructure & Systems: Create and support robust underlying infrastructure and systems that the games team can lean on.
• Collaboration & Expertise: Effectively collaborate with product, creative, and development teams (artists, designers, analysts) to plan and execute development and releases. Assert technical know-how to solve complex platform problems.
• Code Quality & Best Practices: Write efficient, organized, and maintainable code within complex codebases. Contribute to best practices on performance, reliability, architecture, and modern software design principles.
• Monitoring & Support: Monitor game dashboards, logs, and metrics to ensure the code is working seamlessly, ensuring our 24/7 player base can play uninterrupted and bug-free.
• AI-Augmented Development: Proactively leverage AI frameworks and LLM-based coding assistants (e.g., Claude, Codex, GitHub Copilot) to accelerate development cycles, automate boilerplate, and perform initial code reviews, ensuring a high-velocity output without sacrificing quality.

What You Bring:

• 5+ years of recent, relevant software development experience.
• Full-Stack Proficiency: Expertise in both PHP and JavaScript in a full-stack environment.
• Web Technologies: Experience with large-scale web development and HTML5/JS applications. Skilled in front-end development, including core web technologies (JSON, AJAX, CSS).
• OOP & Architecture: Strong understanding of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) and modern software design principles. Ability to write clean, maintainable code and design large components and features.
• High-Volume Systems: Experience creating and supporting products that serve thousands of people concurrently with ease, particularly in high-availability, scalable systems.
• Database Experience: Expert knowledge of databases, including MySQL and MongoDB.
• Source Control: Proficient with source control systems; Git mastery is a strong plus.
• Performance Focus: A performance-driven mindset and a strong ability to write efficient software and optimize existing code.
• The "Ownership" Mindset: A track record of not just finishing tickets, but identifying technical debt and performance bottlenecks in legacy systems and proposing/implementing long-term solutions.
• Modern Tooling Mastery: Proven ability to integrate AI-assisted workflows (Codex, Claude, etc.) into your daily development process to increase efficiency and solve complex debugging tasks faster.

Nice to Have:

• Experience in the games industry or working on a SaaS product.
• Experience with game optimization techniques.
• Experience with AWS or other cloud infrastructure/services.
• Experience with production continuous integration (CI), build pipelines, and automated testing.
• Working knowledge or strong experience with Unix/Linux environments.
• Experience with native mobile platforms (Objective-C/Swift for iOS, Java for Android) or cross-platform tools like Apache Cordova/Phonegap.

Salary Range: ($100,000 - $120,000)
The listed range reflects potential earnings for this role. Actual compensation depends on experience, skills, and alignment with company needs. Most candidates can expect to fall near the midpoint of the range.

**This is an opportunity to work for a remote-first company. Only applicants living in British Columbia will be considered for the role. Must be legally eligible to work in Canada.**

Our Values

Driven by PLAYER OBSESSION, we earn our players’ trust by understanding their needs and creating experiences that put them first.

OWNERSHIP means we take responsibility for our work and outcomes; we follow through, learn from mistakes, and never say “that’s not my job.”

With RESOURCEFULNESS, we do more with less, finding creative ways to overcome challenges and deliver impactful results.

Grounded in CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT, we are relentless in our pursuit of better; for ourselves, our games, and our players.

The Opportunity

At Kano, we build communities through gaming experiences that connect millions of players worldwide. We’re looking for a Principal Engineer (P4 Software Developer) to provide senior technical leadership across our product and backend systems. This role is focused on system design, application architecture, and engineering decision-making - helping teams build scalable, maintainable software while balancing quality, speed, and long-term sustainability.

You’ll work closely with product, design, and engineering teams to guide architectural direction, set engineering standards, and support teams as systems grow in complexity. While you should be comfortable reasoning about infrastructure, pipelines, and security, this role is not a DevOps or SRE position. Your primary focus is on how software systems are designed and built, with day-to-day infrastructure or tooling ownership supported by your Operations team.

Location: Remote within British Columbia, Canada

What You’ll Do

• Drive Technical Excellence: Define and drive a studio‑wide program for quality, performance, and continuous improvement. Establish performance budgets, prevent regressions with automated checks, and improve DORA delivery metrics.
• Lead Security and Privacy: Be the accountable owner for Security and Privacy. Keep us up to date and ahead of Platform Security requirements.
• Manage Operations and Reliability: Lead the Operations team. Set Service Level Objectives with error budgets, design graceful degradation and failover, define on‑call and runbooks, and drive post‑incident reviews that deliver durable fixes.
• Build Observability and Error Monitoring: Standardize logs, metrics, traces, and real‑time error and crash reporting across backend and clients. Create actionable, SLO‑based alerting and executive health dashboards.
• Improve Developer Productivity and the Software Development Lifecycle: Level up CI/CD, branching strategy, and change control. Add quality gates, static analysis, secret scanning, SBOM and dependency management, and supply chain controls.
• Drive FinOps: Own cloud budgets and forecasts. Improve commitment coverage, right‑size compute and storage. Report monthly on cost versus performance.
• Lead Incidents and Risk: Act as incident commander for high‑severity issues. Run table‑tops, keep risks tracked with owners and dates, and prevent recurrences.
• Mentor and Develop Leaders: Coach Tech Leads and senior ICs. Set expectations for design docs, code reviews, and outcomes. Build a culture of clear ownership and a bias toward delivering.
• Partner Cross‑Functionally: Work with Product, Legal, Finance, and Player Success to align technical plans with business goals and regulatory needs.
• Leverage AI as a force multiplier: Use AI to accelerate development and operations (code assist, test generation, incident triage, analytics).
• Own SRED: Create an auditable process with eligibility gates in Jira, contemporaneous notes, and artifact capture. Partner with Finance for accurate, on‑time claims.

What You Bring

• 10+ years in software engineering with 3+ years as a principal‑level platform/architecture leader
• Proven experience operating high‑availability, high‑throughput consumer systems
• Strong AWS background (IAM, VPC, EC2/ECS/Fargate, S3, KMS, GuardDuty, Security Hub, CloudTrail, Config)
• Infrastructure‑as‑code proficiency (Terraform or CDK) and CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions or equivalent)
• Security and privacy ownership in platform‑reviewed environments
• SRE and performance engineering expertise (SLOs, incident management, load/perf testing, graceful degradation)
• Data architecture across relational and non‑relational systems
• Observability stack experience (Graylog, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana or Datadog, ELK or OpenSearch; Sentry/Crashlytics, Backtrace or equivalent)
• Production experience applying AI to speed development and operations
• Clear communicator who influences across product, engineering, legal, and finance

Nice to Have

• Unity, HTML5/JavaScript, and/or PHP game platform experience
• Prior responsibility for FinOps and vendor negotiations
• Experience running SRED or similar R&D incentive programs
• Experience with Mongo and/or MySQL

Salary

($140,000 - $200,000)

The listed pay range reflects the potential earnings for this role. Actual compensation will depend on experience, skills, and alignment with company needs, typically falling toward the midpoint for most candidates