Senior Backend Engineer - Tools and Automation

Senior Backend Engineer Tools and Automation

Gametime seeks a Senior Backend Engineer for the Tools and Automation team. This team builds the technology that powers and scales the operations behind our marketplace - making the processes that keep Gametime running fast, reliable, and efficient.

This position is for a senior individual contributor (IC3) who delivers high-quality systems and tools with a strong sense of ownership and technical craftsmanship. You'll design and build software that simplifies complex workflows, automates manual processes, and enables internal teams to move faster and smarter.

You'll collaborate closely with Engineering, Design, Product, and Operations to build and extend both traditional and AI-driven automation solutions. The ideal candidate combines solid engineering fundamentals with curiosity, initiative, and a bias for improving how things work - not just delivering what's asked.

• Design and deliver automated workflows that deeply understand and reimagine manual operations. Partner with and product teams to map complex workflows, identify bottlenecks, and reinvent them through thoughtful automation freeing teams to focus on higher-order tasks and strategic initiatives.
• Own foundational systems that expose the best capabilities to compose into automated workflows. Ensure these systems are reliable, observable, and easy to extend as business needs evolve.
• Design and build APIs with first principles, enabling composable, predictable, and scalable integrations across Gametime's ecosystem.
• Build, test, instrument, and monitor systems that power the processes behind the scenes of the Gametime marketplace.
• Demonstrate domain ownership by identifying and advocating for improvements or automation opportunities that align with the company's strategic objectives.
• Support and enable teammates through pair programming sessions, design reviews, ideation, and code reviews to strengthen team-wide engineering quality.
• Leverage AI-assisted tools and automation frameworks (e.g., AI Code Gen, LLM-based helpers) to accelerate delivery while maintaining quality, clarity, and maintainability.
• Apply AI and LLM solutions thoughtfully use them where they create genuine leverage in automation or insight, and avoid them where traditional engineering solutions are more effective.
• Collaborate cross-functionally to understand operational pain points and design solutions that balance human judgment with automated efficiency.
• Contribute to team culture and growth, taking initiative to improve how the team learns, collaborates, and delivers impact.

List the specific competencies (skills, behaviors, and abilities) required for success in this role, organized into key areas. Each competency should have a description that connects directly to the tasks in the job.

• Automation and Workflow Systems:
  Demonstrated ability to build and maintain workflow automation and orchestration systems that streamline operational processes. Experience with platforms such as Temporal or Amazon SWF is a plus.
• Backend Development:
  Proficient in designing and developing reliable backend systems using Golang (or Python, Ruby, Java, C++, C#, Rust, Scala, etc.), with strong fundamentals in testing, observability, and performance optimization.
• System Design:
  Skilled in designing distributed systems focused on scalability, performance, reliability, and maintainability. Can reason about tradeoffs in consistency, throughput, and fault tolerance.
• API Development:
  Experienced in building and maintaining well-structured, versioned APIs that enable composable automation and integration across internal and external systems.
• Event-Driven Systems:
  Familiar with message-driven architectures and tools such as Kafka, Rabbit
  
  MQ, or similar, enabling decoupled and reactive automation workflows.
• Databases:
  Solid understanding of both relational (e.g., Postgre
  
  SQL, MySQL) and No
  
  SQL (e.g., Mongo
  
  DB, Dynamo
  
  DB) data models, including schema design and query optimization for automation workloads.
• AI-Driven Automation (Emerging Skill):
  Growing familiarity with leveraging AI-assisted tools (e.g., Cursor, Copilot,…