Hire game backend engineers
Authoritative state, matchmaking and autoscaling — the half of a multiplayer title that decides whether launch week is a celebration or an incident.
What hiring a game backend engineer here gets you
The terms, before the pitch.
Senior and mid+ backend engineers who have run this in production: 52,000 peak concurrent players at 62 ms average latency and 99.98% uptime, on Go services with a Redis event fabric and Kubernetes autoscaling. Billed per engineer per month, three-month minimum, on your board and under your tech lead.
This is the strongest-evidenced role on the list, and it is also the one most often filled too late. The failures it prevents — in-process session state that blocks horizontal scaling, write contention on a hot leaderboard table, autoscaling on CPU for a connection-bound workload — are cheap to design around in advance and close to a re-architecture to retrofit under live traffic.
What a game backend engineer covers here
Six things this role owns, rather than a list of technologies.
Authoritative session services
One writer per piece of state, so duplicate item grants and two clients disagreeing about who won become impossible by construction rather than fixed with locks afterwards.
Matchmaking
Queueing with skill, party, region and mode constraints — which do not compose additively, and which are the usual source of "why is the queue thirty seconds" complaints.
The event fabric
Redis pub/sub for fan-out and queues for work that must survive a crash, with the durable and fast paths kept deliberately separate.
Autoscaling that reacts in time
Scaling on connection count and queue depth rather than CPU, which is a lagging indicator for connection-bound load and moves only once players already feel it.
Load simulation
Run every sprint against the real protocol at a multiple of the target, not as a release gate in the final week. This is the practice that separates hitting a CCU number from having designed for one.
Observability the ops team will use
Dashboards built around the questions live ops actually asks at three in the morning, handed over well before launch so they are familiar rather than novel.
The stack we staff for
What these engineers work in day to day.
Languages
Data
Runtime
Operations
How the engagement works
Six steps from a role brief to an engineer on your board.
Define the role
The stack, the seniority, and what the first month has to produce. That last part is the one most role briefs leave out, and it is the one that makes a shortlist useful.
Meet the engineers
You interview, against your bar and your process. If we do not have the right person for the role we say so rather than putting forward the nearest one — a bad match costs you a quarter.
Contract and NDA
An NDA before any of your code or design material is shared. You hold 100% of the IP from day one. Work can start within 1–2 weeks of signing.
Onboard into your process
Your board, your repo, your standups, your review conventions. The target for week one is a small change landed in your pipeline, not an architecture proposal.
Run it monthly
Billed per engineer per month, $4,000–$7,000 by seniority and from $4,000. Three months minimum, then rolling — below three months onboarding eats most of the value and both sides know it.
Scale or stop
Add engineers as the work grows, or end it with notice. A team of two to eight plus a tech lead is the usual shape, with a QA engineer when the work needs one.
When this is the wrong choice
Outstaffing is the wrong shape for some of the work people bring to it, and finding that out in month two is expensive for everyone.
A managed backend already covers you
For a meaningful share of titles it does, and we will say so on the call rather than in month three. Custom starts paying when you need server logic the platform will not run, or when per-CCU pricing outgrows the build.
You do not know your peak concurrency target
Not a blocker, but it is the first thing to establish — registered users and peak CCU are frequently two orders of magnitude apart and only the second decides what has to be built.
The title is single-player with a leaderboard
That is a web backend, and a smaller one. Paying for game-backend specialisation to build it is overspending.
Common questions
The three that come up on nearly every first call about this role.
What this role has shipped
Two deliveries, and the first one you can install.
Metarun — the match services
The services that own a 1v1v1 race while it runs, the MMR matchmaking behind its ranked leagues, and the anti-cheat that a reward loop makes structural rather than optional. 39,000 concurrent players at its event peak, 60 ms average round-trip, 99.8% uptime in production.
Read case study →Multiplayer game backend
52,000 peak concurrent players, 62 ms average latency, 99.98% uptime — the delivery this role is evidenced by.
Read the case study →Need a game backend engineer on the board?
Tell us the role, the stack and when you need someone starting. We come back with who we can put on it and what it costs, in writing.
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