Senior Engineer, Server

Scopely is looking for a Senior Server Engineer to join our unannounced project in Barcelona on a hybrid basis working 3 days a week from the hub. 

At Scopely, we care deeply about what we do and want to inspire play, every day - whether in our work environments alongside our talented colleagues, or through our deep connections with our communities of players. We are a global team of game lovers who are developing, publishing and innovating the mobile games industry, connecting millions of people around the world daily. 

We embrace AI-forward development practices and expect our engineers to be curious and pragmatic about how these tools can raise the bar.

We are in the early stages of development on an ambitious, unannounced, cross-platform Strategy/MMO title, creating a team of talented and passionate game makers to join us on this exciting journey!

What You Will Do 

• Work in a team responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining backend services and APIs in Python running on AWS
• Design and implement new features in core technologies, working collaboratively with other stakeholder teams to understand requirements and identify the best technical solutions, and plan the future of server core technologies that will lay the foundation for exciting new gameplay features
• Leverage AI tools and agentic workflows in your daily work, from tech planning, code generation and review to exploring novel solutions.
• Lead technical delivery within a cross-functional pod, collaborating daily with QA, Art Leads, Design Leads, and Production to ensure work is scoped, unblocked, and delivered to a high standard
• Represent the engineering team in pod planning meetings, ensuring engineering needs and constraints are clearly communicated and incorporated into roadmap and feature decisions
• Work with your Engineering Manager and Production team to generate effort estimates, breaking down features into actionable tasks and driving the pod to execute effectively across sprints
• Use Miro and similar tools to visualize system architecture, map out feature flows, and align cross-functional stakeholders on technical approach before implementation begins
• Facilitate technical discussions and help resolve disagreements within the pod, enabling the team to make confident decisions and move forward without unnecessary blockers
• Inspect the performance of server clusters and propose improvements
• Deep analysis of player behaviors and how the server can be hardened to both improve player experience and defend against bad actors (botters, cheaters, etc.)
• Work closely with the QA team to resolve bugs and deliver high quality code
• Deploy, monitor, and manage applications in a cloud environment such as AWS
• Stay up-to-date with industry changes and emerging trends, especially regarding Python, Redis and its ecosystem, AWS, Gaming, etc.
• Highly experienced being part of a professional development team or other relevant area
• Experience in developing highly available back-end systems and servers for large-scale MMO games, high-traffic web systems, or applications
• Experienced with Python and its ecosystem (libraries, frameworks, etc.); familiarity with web frameworks such as Flask, Tornado, FastAPI, or similar; Python threading, as well as the principles of async programming
• Familiar with design and implementation of highly-scalable, reliable, and secure systems using Redis and its ecosystem (e.g. Redislabs). Solid understanding of RESTful API design and development. Ability to write efficient low-latency, low-IO code
• Strong knowledge of Linux operating systems and Docker containers, as well as Redis, MySQL (or similar database systems). Good understanding of how to prevent intrusions, injections, cheating, etc.
• Hands-on experience working with AI-assisted development tools (e.g. GitHub Copilot, Codex, Claude Code) and an understanding of how agentic workflows can augment engineering productivity.
• Experience with version control, especially multi-track development and familiarity with deployment methodologies and CI/CD pipelines, as well as automated testing
• Experience with stateful and stateless game server architectures
• Strong communication skills, able to convey technical constraints and tradeoffs clearly to non-technical collaborators such as Design, Art, QA, and Production
• Experience breaking down complex features into estimated, executable tasks and tracking delivery as a team across multiple sprints
• Demonstrated ability to lead a small team of engineers through the full lifecycle of a feature, from scoping to shipping, taking ownership of quality and delivery
• Comfortable facilitating discussions, building cross-functional alignment, and making pragmatic decisions under uncertainty when the team needs to move forward
• Experience with visual collaboration tools such as Miro for technical planning, flow diagrams, and communicating architecture to stakeholders

What We Are Looking For

• Familiarity with messaging systems such as RabbitMQ, AWS SQS, Redis Streams
• Experience working with AWS services like EC2, ECR, RDS, S3, and IAM
• Knowledge of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and experience with Terraform for managing infrastructure deployment
• Understanding of network infrastructure and cloud networking concepts, such as VPC, Subnet, Security Groups, and Load Balancing
• Experience with traffic analysis via Charles proxy, browser developer tools, Datadog, logs
• Understanding Kibana / Datadog log querying and dashboards