Director Engineering Backend  (Live / Game)

Primary: Bay Area (San Francisco / Peninsula)   |   Secondary: NYC

The Opportunity

We're doing an AI-first engineering rebuild for a company that already has an audience of 100M+ people. This is a zero-to-one build with no legacy constraints. You're not joining to babysit existing infrastructure. You're here to create live streaming and gaming experiences that set a new bar for the industry, built from the ground up for the Beast community. You'll define the backend, live, and game tech stacks, design for scale and performance at peak load, and own the reliability and infrastructure cost decisions that matter most.

The Product

You'll own the full live and game tech stack, both frontend and backend, and serve as the backend point of contact across the entire engineering team. Workloads are bursty and correlated: fan-out events drive synchronized connection storms that stress-test every layer of the stack, from load balancers to live streaming service to stateful game servers to database write throughput. That means: 

• Architect the live and game services end to end, building a scalable, high-performing, and cost-efficient system for high-traffic audiences in the US and around the world.
• Design real-time systems (video processing, real-time messaging, leaderboards, etc.) that stay correct and fast under spike-driven load.
• Set the reliability and engineering quality bar: SLOs, capacity planning, incident response, and resilience patterns for systems under massive consumer load.

What You'll Do

• Design the live and game service architecture and drive feature development using AI coding tools, shipping at a velocity that redefines what a small engineering team can deliver. 
• Own the path to production: drive systems from development through deployment, leveraging AI-facilitated QA and SRE processes and tooling to maintain the highest engineering quality at scale. 
• Oversee the team's backend services across security, reliability, and infrastructure cost, and maintain relationships with third-party service providers.
• Lead and mentor a team of engineers, setting the technical bar and growing the team's capabilities alongside the product.

Who You Are

• AI-Native: You're already burning through tokens and using AI coding agents daily to move faster.
• Distributed-Systems Master: 10+ years building and operating large-scale live streaming or gaming services, with real depth in real-time architecture: high concurrency, low latency, eventual consistency, horizontal scaling, and fault tolerance. 
• Battle-Tested at Scale: You've owned the full architecture of live streaming or gaming systems serving large, spike-driven user bases, and you've led the response when one of them broke in production.
• Direction-Setter: You've set technical direction adopted across multiple teams or titles, not just inside one team.

Deep expertise architecting full-stack tech stacks for large-scale live or gaming systems, with hands-on software development experience across backend and frontend (Go, C++, Rust, Java, or equivalent). Bonus points for familiarity with modern AI coding tools and AI-facilitated development processes, and prior hands-on experience with major cloud service providers.

Benefits

• Equity: Highly competitive equity package designed for a foundational hire.
• Hybrid Model: Expected ~3 days per week in-office (Bay Area or NYC).