Senior Software Development Engineer Jobs in Irvine, CA

About the Role

Do you want to build high-scale backend systems for gaming platforms using the latest technologies? Are you the kind of engineer who sweats the details, the race condition nobody else noticed, the retry that could double-charge a user, the edge case hiding in a timeout? Do you have your own opinions about how systems should be designed, and enjoy defending them with reason rather than rank? Do you like working with a tight-knit core team, tackling problems where early exploration becomes long-term wins for the studio?

If that sounds like you, we would love to hear from you.

We are a game development studio expanding from game development to operating our own gaming platform and we're looking for an engineer to build it with us from the ground up.

This is a high-scope, greenfield role. There is no legacy system to babysit and no spec handed down from above. You will help define the architecture, make the trade-offs, and live with the consequences. The APIs you design will become long-term contracts for third-party integrators, and the accounting code you write will handle real money.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the platform's core wallet/ledger system, ensuring transactional correctness and idempotency across the full transaction lifecycle
• Design public-facing APIs for game studios and platform partners: authentication and request signing, error code conventions, versioning, callback and retry strategies
• Build high-concurrency real-time services: persistent connection management, low-latency transaction pipelines, capacity planning, and load testing
• Drive observability: monitoring and alerting, distributed tracing, production incident response and postmortems
• Shape the platform's technical direction: propose, challenge, and own architectural decisions, not just implement them

Skills To Create Thrills

• Experience designing, building, and operating highly available, distributed, real-time live services
• Experience with multi-threaded and asynchronous processing at scale
• Experience designing the overall architecture of end-to-end solutions and making trade-offs
• Strong relational database skills: transactions, isolation levels, locking, and indexing under concurrent load
• Experience building transactional systems: payments, wallets, or ledgers
• Great interpersonal skills and a consistent record of working in a collaborative team environment

Preferred / Nice to Have

• Strong Java fundamentals (we use Java 17 / Spring Boot 3.4)
• Prior experience building backend services like game servers, in-game economies or live ops
• Self-motivated and self-directed, willing to pitch in beyond direct responsibilities
• Ability to self-assess the needs of a system or codebase, and make the case to prioritize that work
• Passion for keeping always-on global services healthy, comfortable with on-call rotations and owning incidents end to end

Benefits

• 401(K) plan eligibility
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Life insurance
• 13 paid holidays per calendar year
• Paid vacation: 10 - 20 days per calendar year
• Up to 5 paid sick days per calendar year

Pay: From $120,000.00 per year

Benefits:

• 401(k)
• 401(k) matching
• Dental insurance
• Health insurance
• Life insurance
• Paid sick time
• Paid time off
• Parental leave
• Retirement plan
• Vision insurance

Language:

• Chinese (Required)

Ability to Commute:

• Irvine, CA 92618 (Required)

Work Location: In person