Senior Backend Engineer
Naphora Games Group · Emea
At Naphora Games Group, we’re building more than games, we’re building a global team of ambitious, driven people who are hungry to learn, experiment, and raise the bar for the next generation of games.
We collaborate openly, move fast, and challenge ourselves every day to build better, smarter, and faster.
Our goal is to create world-class games that players around the globe love and remember. If you thrive in a high-performance, ownership-driven environment and want to make a real impact, you’ll fit right in with us.
Role Summary
We’re looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join our growing team at Naphora Games Group and help us design, build, operate, and scale robust backend systems and platforms.
This is a fully remote position open to candidates from any location, with availability to work in alignment with our Saudi Arabia working schedule (Sunday–Thursday, 9:00 AM–5:00 PM KSA time).
The role is hands-on across backend services, APIs, databases, integrations, and production systems, with a focus on building reliable and scalable solutions that can support large user bases and growing workloads.
Working closely with Engineering, Product, BI, and other teams, you’ll contribute to architecture and technical decision-making while supporting systems throughout their lifecycle, from development through production and live operations.
The role will also involve working with modern AI services and APIs, integrating AI models and AI-powered capabilities into our backend systems and products.
Responsibilities
Backend Development & Architecture
- Design, build, and maintain scalable backend systems, services, and APIs
- Contribute to system architecture and long-term technical decisions
- Build service layers and reusable components that can support multiple products and use cases
- Design and optimize database schemas, queries, indexing, and data models
- Build asynchronous systems using queues, workers, scheduled jobs, and event-driven workflows
- Develop and maintain integrations with external platforms, APIs, and third-party services
Scale, Reliability & Live Operations
- Design systems capable of supporting high traffic, large user bases, and growing workloads
- Support systems throughout their lifecycle, from development to production and live operations
- Improve backend performance, reliability, security, and maintainability
- Identify technical bottlenecks and implement practical, scalable solutions
- Implement monitoring, logging, alerting, error handling, and system health tracking
- Investigate and resolve production incidents, performance issues, database bottlenecks, and service degradation
AI & Integrations
- Integrate AI models, tools, and APIs into existing products and backend workflows
- Build reliable interfaces between backend systems and external AI providers
- Design end-to-end AI-enabled workflows connecting AI services with databases, APIs, backend systems, and product logic
- Evaluate opportunities to use AI to improve product capabilities, workflows, and automation
Collaboration & Engineering Practices
- Work closely with Engineering, Product, Data, Infrastructure, and other functions to deliver new features and products
- Participate in technical planning, architecture reviews, and code reviews
- Communicate technical risks, trade-offs, and solutions clearly
- Contribute to improving engineering practices, system maintainability, and overall technical quality
Success Looks Like
- Building reliable and scalable backend systems that perform effectively as our products and user base grow
- Designing backend services and APIs that are maintainable, reusable, and able to support multiple products
- Maintaining strong system reliability, performance, and uptime in live production environments
- Identifying and resolving production issues, bottlenecks, and scaling challenges effectively
- Building practical AI integrations and workflows that add value to our products and internal systems
- Making thoughtful technical and architectural decisions that support both immediate and long-term needs
- Contributing to stronger engineering practices, monitoring, reliability, and operational processes
- Collaborating effectively across technical and product teams
Qualifications
- 5+ years of professional backend engineering experience, or equivalent hands-on experience building complex production systems
- Strong experience designing, building, and maintaining backend systems in production
- Proven experience working on live systems, products, or platforms serving a large number of users
- Experience operating or supporting production environments as part of LiveOps, platform operations, or continuous product operations
- Hands-on experience integrating AI tools, models, LLMs, or AI APIs into production systems and building practical solutions on top of them
- Ability to design and implement end-to-end AI-enabled workflows connecting AI services with backend systems, databases, APIs, and product logic
- Strong understanding of backend architecture, distributed systems, API design, databases, caching, concurrency, scalability, performance optimization, and system reliability
- Strong experience with at least one backend language or framework such as Python, Node.js/TypeScript, Go, Java, or C#
- Strong SQL and database design experience, including PostgreSQL, MySQL, or similar relational databases
- Experience building REST APIs and service-based architectures
- Experience with Redis or similar caching technologies
- Experience with message queues, workers, or event-driven systems
- Experience integrating third-party APIs and external services
- Experience working with cloud-based production environments
- Hands-on experience dealing with production challenges such as traffic spikes, service degradation, incidents, database bottlenecks, scaling, and uptime
- Strong problem-solving, communication, and collaboration skills
- Able to take ownership of backend systems and technical problems from development through production
- Experience working with backend systems for mobile games, consumer apps, or other high-scale products is a plus
If this role excites you and you’re ready to help shape the future of game development at Naphora, we encourage you to apply.