Lead Platform Engineer - Infrastructure & Backend

Who are we?

The company is one of the largest independent mobile games companies in the world.

We are a multi-award-winning organisation, with a global 2,500+ strong team across 12 studios.

Our expanded portfolio includes some of the biggest titles in mobile gaming, collectively reaching top chart positions around the world and engaging over 25 million daily active users.

The company’s guiding principle is that when people love what they do, what they do will be loved by others.

We’re building a company we’re proud of. One filled with driven, incredibly smart and detail-orientated people, who LOVE making games.

Our ambition is to be the most successful games company in the world, and we’re just getting started.

This role will be working with Lion Studio.

Lion Studios is a mobile games publisher that works with mobile developers to get their games discovered by players around the world. Headquartered in San Francisco, Lion Studios’ creative and strategy teams utilize their expertise to help game developers break through the noise and grow their businesses.

Since launching in 2018, Lion Studios has driven 90% of its games to the Top 10 in the App Store and Google Play and helped drive 16 games to #1 in the US App Store’s Top Free chart.

About the Role

Lion Studios is looking for an Infrastructure & Backend Engineering Lead to own and evolve the technical foundation behind our games, analytics systems, internal products, and web services. This role combines technical leadership with hands-on engineering across AWS, data infrastructure, backend and game services, and web infrastructure. You’ll help set technical direction, lead the team, and work alongside engineers to design, build, and improve the systems that support Lion and our games.

We’re looking for someone who can keep critical systems reliable while also looking ahead, identifying opportunities, and driving technical improvements across the organization.

What You’ll Own

Cloud & Infrastructure

• Own our AWS infrastructure, architecture, reliability, monitoring, security, and cost optimization.

• Drive infrastructure automation, CI/CD, observability, and operational best practices.

• Design and implement improvements to our cloud infrastructure and shared services.

• Support infrastructure and hosting for internal products, websites, APIs, and other services.

Data & Analytics Infrastructure

• Own the infrastructure behind our analytics stack, including Snowflake and high-volume game event pipelines.

• Improve the reliability, performance, scalability, and cost of our data infrastructure.

• Work closely with Analytics and BI to evolve the underlying data platform.

• Help design and implement changes as our data and analytics needs grow.

Backend & Game Services

• Own shared backend services, APIs, game servers, and live game infrastructure.

• Design and build backend systems alongside the team.

• Help define architecture and hosting strategies for services used across our games.

• Support studios and internal teams integrating with Lion’s backend systems.

Technical Leadership

• Build and own the technical roadmap for the team.

• Lead engineers and stay involved in architecture, implementation, code reviews, and solving complex technical problems.

• Proactively identify technical problems and opportunities and drive them forward.

• Turn ambiguous business and technical problems into clear options, recommendations, and execution plans.

• Build strong relationships across Engineering, Analytics, Product, QA, Solutions, and our partner studios.

• Own projects through rollout and beyond, including monitoring, feedback, adoption, and iteration.

What We’re Looking For

• Strong software engineering background with experience building and operating production systems.

• Strong experience with cloud infrastructure, ideally AWS.

• Strong backend and distributed systems experience.

• Experience with modern data infrastructure and high-volume data pipelines. Snowflake experience is strongly preferred.

• Experience with infrastructure as code, CI/CD, monitoring, automation, and cloud cost management.

• Experience leading engineers and owning technical roadmaps.

• Comfortable working across code, infrastructure, architecture, and production systems.

• Strong technical judgment and the ability to make decisions across multiple areas of engineering.

• Strong ownership and follow-through from initial idea through launch, measurement, feedback, and iteration.

• Ability to identify opportunities and drive improvements without needing everything to be fully defined upfront.

• Strong communication skills and the ability to work across technical and non-technical teams.

Nice to Have

• Experience in mobile gaming, consumer mobile products, AdTech, or another high-scale environment.

• Experience operating live game services or other highly available backend systems.

• Experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, Kafka or similar event infrastructure, and modern observability tools.

• Experience with Snowflake optimization and large-scale analytics workloads.

• Experience working with distributed teams and external development studios.

What Success Looks Like

You’ll help set the technical direction for the systems that power Lion Studios and work with the team to bring that direction to life.

Our infrastructure is reliable, scalable, and cost-conscious. The team has clear technical direction, projects have strong ownership from idea through rollout, and we’re continuously improving the systems and services that support our games and teams.

Working at the company

• Time Off: Flexible Discretionary Time Off policy in addition to bank holidays to relax and refresh throughout the year.

• Financial: Generous 401k match, discretionary bonuses, and competitive salaries.

• Health & Wellness: Comprehensive Medical, Dental, and Vision coverage.

• Employee Assistance Program: Anytime you need it, tap into confidential, caring support with our Employee Assistance Program, always here to lend an ear and a helping hand.

• Continuous Professional Development: Propel your career with continuous opportunities for professional development.

• Family-Friendly Culture: A generous parental leave policy and a supportive, family-friendly culture.

• Regular company events: Yearly on-site events that celebrate our achievements and our team spirit.

This role is currently open to remote candidates based in the following U.S. states: California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Texas and Washington. Candidates based in Dallas will follow a hybrid work arrangement with our Dallas studio, with four days per week in the office (Monday–Thursday).

The anticipated base salary range for this role is $150,000–$185,000. Compensation decisions are made based on the unique qualifications, experience and circumstances of each candidate. Actual compensation is determined based on a variety of factors, including, but not limited to an individual's skills, experience, education, training, licenses and certifications (where applicable), as well as business and organizational needs. The final compensation package will be based on the specific position offered in addition to a full range of medical and other benefits.

The company is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status, or other legally protected characteristics.

As part of our interview process, we may use AI-enabled tools to assist with note-taking and summarizing conversations. These tools are used only to support our recruiters and interviewers. They are not used to screen applications or make hiring decisions. All candidate evaluations and hiring decisions are made by people.

This opening is for an existing vacancy.

All legitimate the company roles are only posted on our official careers page and LinkedIn and we do not conduct job interviews via messaging apps like WhatsApp, Telegram or others. We never ask for personal or financial information during interviews. Sensitive information is only ever requested after a formal written offer through official channels.  Any attempt to do so may be the result of a scam or phishing attack, and you should not engage. Our in-house recruitment team will only contact individuals through their official Company email addresses (the company)