Senior/Lead Backend Engineer

THE COMPANY MEDAL Medal is the world’s largest and fastest-growing platform for gaming clips, where millions of gamers capture, share, and relive their best moments. Every year, our players record billions of clips, each representing a unique, action-packed highlight. We’re building the next generation of gaming communities - social, monetized, and creator-powered. Our mission is to design products that make sharing, discovering, and connecting around gaming moments seamless and fun. We raised a seed round of $133M from General Catalyst and Khosla to discover the next generation of intelligence. 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. We’re looking for a Senior or Lead Backend Engineer to help us scale and evolve this infrastructure as we grow. In this role, you'll work closely with product, infra, and data teams to architect and build highly scalable, low-latency systems. You'll help design critical APIs, evolve our backend infrastructure, mentor other engineers, and drive technical decisions that impact millions of users. If you love building resilient systems, thinking about architecture at scale, and want to work on a product that blends gaming, content, and community - this role is for you. YOU WILL - Design and develop backend systems and REST APIs that serve millions of users and billions of clips - Own features end-to-end: from design and architecture through implementation and deployment - Work closely with cross-functional teams across product, ML, and mobile to build cohesive experiences - Scale our systems to support growth in users, content volume, and features - Lead engineering projects, drive architectural decisions, and mentor junior and mid-level backend engineers - Help maintain our cloud infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines - Optimize databases, APIs, and services for performance, scalability, and cost - Contribute to technical strategy, roadmap, and team-wide best practices YOU NEED - 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 - Experience with relational databases like 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 POINTS - Experience with Redis, RabbitMQ, or other message brokers and caching systems - Familiarity with Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, and modern DevOps practices - Experience with observability tools and performance monitoring - Exposure to ElasticSearch, BigQuery, or other data warehouse tools - Contributions to open-source projects - A passion for games and gaming communities OUR STACK - Backend: Java, Redis, RabbitMQ, Kubernetes, Terraform - Cloud: Google Cloud Platform, AWS - Frontend: Electron, React, Redux - Native: C#, C++, Swift, Kotlin - CI/CD & Infra: GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Salt, Docker BENEFITS - Competitive salary and meaningful equity - Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage - 401(k) - Wellness and fitness perks including a Wellhub membership and mental health resources - Paid parental leave, fertility and maternal health benefits - Generous PTO policy - Daily meals and commuter benefits at our NYC HQ in Flatiron - Learning and development stipend Benefits vary by country and employment type. WHY JOIN US At Medal, you’ll have the autonomy to make an impact from Day 1. You’ll join a team that values humility, curiosity, and momentum, and you’ll help shape the future of how