Tech Lead Backend Developer (Gameplay team) at Scorewarrior

Scorewarrior is a game developer and publisher based in Limassol, Cyprus. The company focuses on the 4X strategy genre, with an ambitious goal to grow its hit game, Total Battle, to become the No.1 strategy game in the world. Our team consists of 200+ passionate, talented, self-driven, and continually developing professionals who love making high-quality games. Our product: We are currently working on Total Battle — an MMO 4X strategy game with a deep political system and lots of player interaction. Players take on the role of a commander and need to develop their city, forge alliances, fight against monsters, and conquer other players. We're constantly developing new game mechanics, and the project is continuing to grow. Our game project has a code base of ~300k SLOC and consists of multiple services running in several hundred instances. The game services are a sharded system for horizontal scaling. Our team is seeking a Tech Lead with deep C++ expertise and strong architectural vision to steer the evolution of new game functionality for a large-scale multiplayer project with long-term gameplay. Our team's objective and the challenge they face is to create an outstanding technical design that ensures quality, flexibility, and simplicity in the development of in-game features. Tasks: - Identifying and eliminating issues that reduce developer effectiveness on the team or lead to low-quality solutions. - Coordinating with Framework and Core teams to resolve problems that arise when using their solutions and overseeing the remediation process. - Conducting technical reviews of solutions developed within the team. - Creating a preliminary solution design, decomposing features based on it, and training the team in these skills. - Participating in hiring new developers: evaluating candidates and conducting technical interviews. - Performing design, development, or technical-debt tasks with the time remaining after fulfilling tech lead responsibilities. - 5+ years of production software development experience, including 3+ years in backend engineering. - Strong proficiency in modern C++ (C++17/20) and the STL; solid understanding of templates (including variadic templates and concepts) and RAII. - Proven ability to own and deliver medium-to-large components/systems (≈ up to 3 months of work), sometimes involving cross-team collaboration, from assignment through production launch and stabilization. - Proven ability to set measurable team-improvement goals and successfully deliver on them. - Experience creating preliminary solution designs and decomposing features into actionable tasks. - Track record of systematically identifying, prioritizing, and remediating technical debt. - Experience mentoring and developing engineers through regular 1:1s and individualized growth plans. The following would also be to your advantage: - Having samples of code that you can show us. - Knowledge of other high-level programming languages (for general awareness). - Practical experience applying Domain-Driven Design in real-world projects. - Hands-on experience building applications using Akka.NET, Microsoft Orleans, or similar actor-based frameworks. We use: - C++20, Clang, and CMake. - Boost — only for the library, not for game code. - PostgreSQL. - GitLab, TeamCity, Ansible. - SonarQube, Clang-Tidy, Clang-Format. - Onboarding, coding conventions. - Python for utilities. - Linux. Our technical developments: - A library/framework of ready-made solutions for creating game features. - ORM — allows us not to have to write code for saving to the DB. - A code generator for a binary RPC protocol and ORM. - A pub/sub event system for game clients. - Telemetry that allows for real-time product status tracking (through Grafana). - An expression interpreter for flexibility in game configuration. - HotReload environment, with everyday game updates. - Sync and Async network designs. - Internal Event System. - Internal persistent and transactional message system. - R-tree based world map. What we offer and our benefits: - A team of professionals with a passion for gamedev and a drive to make Total Battle the #1 strategy MMO game. - An excellent remuneration package, including a 13th salary. - Full relocation coverage for you and your family to Cyprus (Limassol). - A modern, sunny office close to the sea. - Private health insurance for you and your family members. - A monthly pre-school, school, and university allowance for employees' children. - Lunch compensation. - A sports and fitness allowance. - Company-funded personal development opportunities (professional and language courses, books, etc.). - Bonuses for outstanding results, years of service, marriage, and childbirth. - Friendly monthly office parties and epic annual offsite company birthday and Christmas celebrations.