Senior / Lead Backend Engineer

Medal
New York, US
On-site

Who this role is best for

Aimed at senior backend engineers proficient in Java and distributed systems, working on high-scale gaming platforms in New York City.

Best fit for

  • Senior engineers with production-scale Java microservices experience seeking leadership in gaming tech.
    — “5+ years of backend engineering experience, with significant time in production environments”
  • Architects comfortable driving cross-team technical decisions on high-traffic systems.
    — “driving technical decisions that impact millions of users”
  • Backend specialists who optimize database performance at scale.
    — “Relational databases: Experience with MySQL or PostgreSQL, including performance tuning”

Things to consider

  • Role involves mentoring and leading technical direction beyond individual contributions.
    — “mentoring other engineers, and driving technical decisions”
  • Systems must handle thousands of requests per second with low latency.
    — “building systems that handle thousands of requests per second”

How to stand out

  • Demonstrate specific examples of scaling Java services under heavy load.
    — “hands-on experience building scalable microservices”
  • Highlight cross-functional projects where you designed critical APIs.
    — “helping design critical APIs, evolving our backend infrastructure”
  • Showcase cloud infrastructure automation and incident response experience.
    — “Comfort with cloud infrastructure (GCP or AWS preferred)”
Pace · SteadyCollaboration · HighAutonomy · MediumDecision Impact · TeamLevel · Senior

Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.

What success looks like

  • highly scalable and low-latency systems
  • evolving backend infrastructure
  • mentoring other engineers
  • driving technical decisions
Typical background
backend engineeringdistributed systems

Skills & requirements

Required

JavaMicroservicesRestful-apiDatabasesCloud-infrastructureSystem-design

Preferred

RedisRabbitmqSREDevOps

Stack & domain

JavaBackend EngineeringMicroservicesRestful Api DesignDistributed SystemsMySQLPostgreSQLPerformance TuningSchema DesignCloud InfrastructureCI/CDInfrastructure As CodeSystem DesignArchitectural PatternsSecurity Best PracticesRedisRabbitmqSREDevOpsDevSecOpsCommunicationLeadershipCross-team ProjectsBackendInfrastructureDataCloudSecurity

About the role

Original posting from Medal via Ashby

ABOUT MEDAL

Millions of gamers capture, share, and discover new games on Medal, the largest platform for gaming clips. Our mission is to design products that make sharing and connecting around gaming seamless and fun, and build a place where brands and game publishers can reach high-quality gamers to grow their products. Medal's data powers General Intuition, the frontier research lab that recently raised $320M at a $2.3B valuation led by Khosla Ventures with participation from General Catalyst, Eric Schmidt, and Jeff Bezos.

THE ROLE

Medal's backend powers everything from real-time in-app communications and storage of billions of user-generated clips to our ML-based feed and social features. You'll work closely with product, infra, and data teams to architect and build highly scalable, low-latency systems, helping design critical APIs, evolving our backend infrastructure, mentoring other engineers, and driving technical decisions that impact millions of users.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

  • 5+ years of backend engineering experience, with significant time in production environments
  • Strong proficiency in Java and hands-on experience building scalable microservices
  • Deep understanding of RESTful API design and distributed systems
  • Relational databases: Experience with MySQL or PostgreSQL, including performance tuning and schema design
  • Experience building systems that handle thousands of requests per second
  • Comfort with cloud infrastructure (GCP or AWS preferred), CI/CD, and infrastructure as code
  • Strong grasp of system design, architectural patterns, and security best practices
  • Strong communication and leadership skills, with the ability to drive cross-team projects
  • Bonus: Redis, RabbitMQ, or other message brokers and caching systems; SRE/DevOps or DevSecOps experience

OUR STACK

Electron, React, Redux, Styled Components & other modern web-based technologies

C# and C++ for native windows recording & more

Swift for iOS, Kotlin for Android

Java, Redis, RabbitMQ, Kubernetes for backend

Terraform, Salt, GitHub Actions, CircleCI for IaC and CI/CD

Source: Medal careers (Ashby)

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