Engineering Lead - Goodgame Empire

About the Position

We're seeking an Engineering Lead for Goodgame Empire to lead engineering across backend and frontend, ensuring high-throughput, low-latency Java services on AWS.

Responsibilities

• Lead engineering across backend and frontend: set technical direction, own delivery end-to-end, grow the team through mentoring and reviews that raise the bar.
• Translate fuzzy business requirements into precise technical solutions that both humans and agents can execute, and deliver them reliably and on time.
• Design and operate high-throughput, low-latency Java services (JDK 17+) on AWS, K8s, Terraform, ArgoCD, with MySQL and Redis layers handling millions of player rows.
• Oversee the game frontend (HTML5, Adobe AIR / Unity) built by specialists: guide the architecture, review the work, keep it coherent with the backend.
• Own CI/CD, observability, and on-call for what your team ships.
• Define how the org adopts agentic practices: tooling, review standards, and what "done" means when an agent wrote most of the diff.

Requirements

Leadership

• Proven experience leading engineers (engineering lead, tech lead, or similar), accountable for a team's output, not just your own.
• You grow people, make decisions under ambiguity, and keep a team shipping without becoming the bottleneck. Your standards on architecture, testing, and review set the tone.
• You oversee backend and frontend without being the top specialist in each: you know enough to guide, review, and unblock.

Technical Skills

• 6+ years backend Java, expert level. Distributed systems, concurrency, GC tuning, and SQL optimisation are second nature.
• Deep AWS / cloud-native stack (K8s, Docker, Terraform).
• Enough frontend/game-client fluency to lead it credibly and hold a real architectural conversation with Adobe AIR / Unity engineers.
• Architectural judgement: you design clean, resilient systems, you don't just accept what the agent produces.
• Excellent written English.
• Availability in German time zone (CET/CEST).

AI and Agentic Engineering

• At minimum: genuinely excited about AI-assisted engineering and already using it daily.
• Ideally: you already run a real agentic coding practice and can talk concretely about it (structuring context for long-running tasks, when to let an agent run vs. intervene, MCP / custom tools / skills, reviewing agent code without becoming a bottleneck).

Nice to Have

• Hands-on Adobe AIR and/or Unity experience (built or shipped game-client code yourself).
• Gaming backend experience (matchmaking, inventories, leaderboards, economy services).
• Event-driven architectures (Kafka, Kinesis, SQS/SNS); real-time telemetry or anti-cheat.
• Published work on agentic workflows (blog posts, OSS subagents/skills, internal tooling).

Why This Role Is Different

• AI-first from the top down. We already run agentic workflows in production, leadership builds with Claude Code daily, and you have full autonomy over your AI stack. No mandated tools, no legacy process to fight.
• You lead, and you build. Not a management role that pulls you off the keyboard.
• You own the whole stack: backend and frontend, strong specialists on both sides, you connect them into one coherent system.
• Scale with immediate feedback: systems players touch every minute, where engineering decisions show up in metrics the same day.

How We Will Interview

Expect to walk us through the technical, the leadership, and the delivery side.

On the technical side: an agentic workflow you've actually built or used – the specs and context you feed it, how you structure the loop, where it breaks, how you catch it, and what you'd never let an agent do unsupervised. Bring screen-shares, repos, prompts, whatever shows the real thing.

On the leadership side: how you've grown engineers, overseen work outside your own deepest specialty, translated business asks into shipped software, and made hard calls under ambiguity. We're more interested in your judgement and battle scars than in polished slides.

About Goodgame Studios

Goodgame Studios is a leading free-to-play, online games development company active on web and mobile platforms. We self-publish our games in-house and have all relevant professions under one roof: Game Development, Quality Assurance, Community Management and Customer Support to Business Development, Marketing, Analytics and Central IT services. These departments work hand in hand to provide quality gaming experiences to over 200 million registered users worldwide.

Goodgame Studios is part of Stillfront. Stillfront is a global gaming company with 1200+ employees. We develop a wide range of digital games that attract over 40 million players each month. From well-established franchises like Supremacy, Big Farm, and BitLife to niche games, we span many different genres, including strategy, simulation, RPG and action, and casual and mash-up games.

Contact

Lisa Stick

Senior Talent Acquisition Partner – Human Resources