Lead Full Stack Developer

At Couch Heroes, we’re exploring new ground for the MMO genre. In a world where fantasy and ancient technology intertwine, players explore shattered realms, grapple across verticality, solve puzzles, and push back corruption, with progression driven by player expression and discovery. We envision bridging generations of gamers, creating a space where both coexist and journey together. We’re developing in Unreal Engine, in early production, with a team spanning multiple countries.

We’re remote-first, based in the UK, and scaling to support a multi-year live-service roadmap. We value autonomy, curiosity, and collaborative ownership, and we’re looking for creators who want to help build something from the ground up. Sound like your kind of thing? We should talk.

The web and platform layer of an MMO is what players interact with outside the game client: account systems, social features, community tools, content delivery, and the services that tie the live experience together. We need a Lead Full-Stack Developer who can own the architecture of these systems and build the engineering team that delivers them.

You will report to the CTO and manage a growing team of web and platform engineers. You will make architectural decisions, stay hands‑on with code, and represent the web engineering discipline across the studio in production planning and resourcing decisions.

We are in early production. The studio has been running for three years, and core platform infrastructure is being built alongside the game itself. You will be making foundational choices about stack architecture, service boundaries, deployment pipelines, and data models that the team builds on for years to come. This is not a maintenance role. You are building systems from the ground up.

• Manage a growing team of engineers as the team scales through production: set priorities, assign work, balance workload, and run regular 1:1s focused on progress, career development, and honest feedback.
• Lead performance reviews and goal setting aligned to production milestones and individual development plans. Identify skill gaps and address them through coaching, stretch assignments, or training.
• Represent the web engineering discipline in cross‑discipline leads meetings, production planning, and resourcing conversations. Advocate for team needs and capacity.
• Foster a team culture of code quality, shared ownership, and continuous improvement.
• Support hiring as the team grows: contribute to job descriptions, review technical submissions, and participate in interview loops.

• Architect and lead the development of backend microservices using Type Script, Node.js, and Express, with Mongo
  
  DB for persistent storage and Redis for caching, session management, and pub/sub messaging.
• Design scalable, well‑bounded services that support the throughput and reliability demands of a live‑service MMO: player accounts, social systems, marketplace, mail, inventory, and platform integrations.
• Own CI/CD pipelines using Azure Pipelines, with Docker and Kubernetes on Azure for container orchestration and deployment. Establish deployment practices that support rapid iteration without compromising stability.
• Make architectural decisions about service boundaries, data models, caching strategies, and API design that balance immediate delivery needs with long‑term scalability.
• Establish monitoring, alerting, and incident response practices using Grafana and Uptime Kuma or equivalent observability tools.

• Build polished, responsive, and accessible interfaces using Type Script, React, and Next.js, with Redux for state management and Zod for schema validation.
• Collaborate with UI/UX design to ensure clean design‑to‑implementation handoff and user‑centric workflows across platform features.
• Ensure frontend systems are built for internationalisation, accessibility, and performance from the start.

• Work with gameplay engineering and online services to define how web platform systems integrate with the game client: authentication, account management, social features,…