Senior Java Backend & DevOps Engineer – Agentic Engineering

About the Position

We're seeking a Senior Java Backend & DevOps Engineer with expertise in agentic workflows to join our team at Goodgame Studios in Hamburg, Germany. You'll bring your practice to backend systems that keep entire game worlds alive for millions of players. Always-on, low-latency, unpredictable load. Real player impact when something is off by 20 ms.

In this role you'll join Goodgame Studios – self-published MMO strategy titles, 200M+ registered players, €1B+ in lifetime revenue, part of Stillfront Group, one of Europe's leading game publishers.

Responsibilities

• Design and operate high-throughput, low-latency Java services (JDK 17+) on AWS, K8s, Terraform, ArgoCD.
• Build resilient distributed components and tune memory, concurrency, and GC for real production workloads.
• Architect MySQL and Redis layers handling millions of player rows.
• Own CI/CD, observability, and on-call for systems you ship.
• Run an agentic workflow that holds up under code review: precise specs, tight feedback loops, generated tests, validation gates, your judgement as the final filter on architecture, security, and performance.
• Help define how the rest of the engineering org adopts agentic practices – tooling, review standards, what "done" means when an agent wrote 80% of the diff.

Requirements

• 6+ years backend Java, expert level. Distributed systems, concurrency, GC tuning, SQL optimisation are second nature.
• Deep AWS and cloud-native stack (K8s, Docker, Terraform).
• A real agentic coding practice. You can talk concretely about: how you structure prompts and context for long-running tasks, when you let an agent run autonomously vs. when you intervene, how you manage multi-agent setups, what you've built with MCP / custom tools / skills, and how you review agent-generated code without becoming a bottleneck.
• Strong analytical decomposition – the ability to turn fuzzy product asks into precise constraints both humans and agents can execute against.
• Architectural judgement. You design clean, resilient systems; you don't just accept whatever the agent produces.
• Highly proficient in English.
• Seeking full-time remote roles (within Germany, valid German visa required) or Freelance opportunities within the German timezone (CET/CEST).

Nice to Have

• Gaming backend experience (matchmaking, inventories, leaderboards, economy services).
• Event-driven architectures (Kafka, Kinesis, SQS/SNS).
• Real-time telemetry or anti-cheat systems.
• Published or shared work on agentic workflows – blog posts, OSS subagents/skills, internal tooling you've open-sourced.

How We'll Interview

Expect to walk us through an agentic workflow you've actually built and 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. We're more interested in your judgement and battle scars than in polished slides.

Why This Role is Different

• You'll work on systems players interact with every minute, at a scale where engineering decisions show up immediately in metrics.
• You'll help set the bar for what agentic engineering looks like in a 30+ person backend org that ships real products – not a lab, not a pilot.
• High autonomy. Remote within the German time zone. Engineering-first culture.
• Genuinely interesting technical surface area: Java, MySQL, Redis, AWS, distributed systems, plus the meta-problem of how to run all of it agentically without sacrificing reliability.

About the Company

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.