Engineering Lead - Goodgame Empire
You'll lead engineering for the Empire Family – Goodgame Empire and Empire: Four Kingdoms, the flagship MMO strategy franchise of Goodgame Studios, a studio with over 200 million registered players and €1B+ in lifetime revenue. Two titles live for over a decade, generating significant revenue, consistently profitable, and a strategic core of Stillfront's portfolio. Millions of players, always-on worlds, real impact when latency slips by 20 ms. This is not a side project. It's a key franchise you own the engineering for as it moves into its next growth phase.
We're looking for a technical leader who ships and owns the whole picture: the architect and reviewer across backend and frontend, who also grows the engineers and the practices around them. You lead by setting direction and raising the bar, not by stepping away from the code. You don't have to be the deepest specialist in every layer, we have strong frontend and backend experts. We need the person who oversees both, connects them, and is accountable for the whole thing landing reliably and on time.
Part of the leverage here is agentic. You and your team operate at many times the throughput of a classical engineering group by orchestrating AI agents, not typing every line. The agents do the volume, you stay the architect and the reviewer, and you set the standard for how that's done responsibly.
YOUR MISSION
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.
YOUR PROFILE
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.