[Hiring] Lead Backend Engineer @Blitzoo

Role Description

Our backend is a Scala / Play Framework platform built on Akka clustering and MongoDB, running real-time multiplayer casino gameplay, promotions, sweepstakes mechanics, and payment processing across three live products. The Lead Backend Engineer takes ownership of these systems end-to-end:

• The real-time gameplay layer
• The payment and compliance surface
• The backend infrastructure shared across all three products

This is an ownership role, not a maintenance role. The expectation is architectural and operational leadership across a large, mature, multi-product codebase — not just delivery against a backlog. This person is expected to:

• Decide what the system should do next and why
• Set technical direction
• Make calls that trade off correctness, complexity, and risk
• Be accountable for the health of the system as a whole

Qualifications

• 7+ years professional backend engineering experience, with real ownership of a production system at meaningful scale
• Strong Scala experience — functional style, ideally with Play Framework or a comparable typed functional web framework
• Production experience with an actor-model or comparable distributed-systems framework (Akka, Erlang/OTP, or similar)
• Experience with async/reactive database access patterns (ReactiveMongo or equivalent reactive-driver experience)
• Demonstrated ownership of at least one payment, billing, or other compliance-sensitive integration in production
• Strong distributed-systems judgment: can reason about race conditions, idempotency under retry/duplicate delivery, and compatibility across a rolling deploy

Requirements

• System ownership: Hold end-to-end technical ownership of the backend across all major service domains: game logic, promotions, payments, sweepstakes, player accounts, admin/backoffice, and analytics
• Real-time architecture: Lead design and evolution of the WebSocket / Akka-actor-based real-time gameplay layer and the Akka cluster it runs on
• Payments & compliance: Own integration correctness for Paysafe, WorldPay (including 3DS flows), Apple StoreKit, and Google Play billing, in coordination with legal/compliance on regulatory requirements for sweepstakes-model gaming
• Shared infrastructure stewardship: Make and review changes to backend infrastructure shared across all three casino gaming products, with awareness of cross-product impact
• Operational leadership: Own production health for a live, revenue-generating system: deploys, cluster operations, incident response, and postmortems
• Technical mentorship: Set technical direction, run code review, and raise the engineering judgment bar for the team working in this codebase
• Knowledge continuity: Absorb knowledge transfer from the outgoing lead and become the system's primary technical authority

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in iGaming, sweepstakes, or other regulated real-money gaming
• Experience with real-time, low-latency, or WebSocket-heavy backend systems
• Experience maintaining and evolving a legacy codebase (10+ years) without a rewrite
• Experience with MongoDB operations beyond query-writing — indexing strategy, replica set behavior under load