Engineering Lead Goodgame Empire

Youll 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 Stillfronts portfolio. Millions of players always-on worlds real impact when latency slips by 20 ms. This is not a side project. Its a key franchise you own the engineering for as it moves into its next growth phase.

Were 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 dont 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 thats done responsibly.

• 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.
  

• Proven experience leading engineers (engineering lead tech lead or similar) accountable for a teams 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.

• 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 dont just accept what the agent produces.

• Excellent written English.

• Availability in German time zone (CET/CEST).

• 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).

• 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).

• 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.

Expect to walk us through the technical the leadership and the delivery side.

On the technical side: an agentic workflow youve 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 youd never let an agent do unsupervised. Bring screen-shares repos prompts whatever shows the real thing.

On the leadership side: how youve grown engineers overseen work outside your own deepest specialty translated business asks into shipped software and made hard calls under ambiguity. Were more interested in your judgement and battle scars than in polished slides.

Goodgame Studios is known for data-driven game development and successful live-service strategy titles. We self-publish our games in-house with all relevant disciplines under one roof. Our studio is based in Hamburg Germany and we welcome applications from international candidates. English is our working language. As part of Stillfront Group one of Europes leading game publishers we work on long-term IP growth with a strong focus on execution.