Lead Backend Engineer

Position Summary Our backend is a Scala / Play Framework platform built on Akka clustering and MongoDB, running real-time multiplayer casino gameplay, promotions, sweepstakes mechanics, and payment processing across three live products. The Lead Backend Engineer takes ownership of these systems end-to-end: the real-time gameplay layer, the payment and compliance surface, and the backend infrastructure shared across all three products. This is an ownership role, not a maintenance role. The expectation is architectural and operational leadership across a large, mature, multi-product codebase — not just delivery against a backlog. Concretely: this person is expected to decide what the system should do next and why, not only implement what a backlog already specifies — setting technical direction, making calls that trade off correctness, complexity, and risk in ways no ticket fully captures, and being accountable for the health of the system as a whole, not just the tickets closed against it. Responsibilities System ownership. Hold end-to-end technical ownership of the backend across all major service domains: game logic, promotions, payments, sweepstakes, player accounts, admin/backoffice, and analytics. Real-time architecture. Lead design and evolution of the WebSocket / Akka-actor-based real-time gameplay layer and the Akka cluster it runs on. Payments & compliance. Own integration correctness for Paysafe, WorldPay (including 3DS flows), Apple StoreKit, and Google Play billing, in coordination with legal/compliance on regulatory requirements for sweepstakes-model gaming. Shared infrastructure stewardship. Make and review changes to backend infrastructure shared across all three casino gaming products, with awareness of cross-product impact. Operational leadership. Own production health for a live, revenue-generating system: deploys, cluster operations, incident response, and postmortems. Technical mentorship. Set technical direction, run code review, and raise the engineering judgment bar for the team working in this codebase. Knowledge continuity. Absorb knowledge transfer from the outgoing lead — primarily through prepared written documentation, with live overlap only to the extent hiring completes before their departure — and become the system's primary technical authority. Required Qualifications 7+ years professional backend engineering experience, with real ownership (not just contribution) of a production system at meaningful scale. Strong Scala experience — functional style, not incidental Scala syntax on top of Java habits — ideally with Play Framework or a comparable typed functional web framework. Production experience with an actor-model or comparable distributed-systems framework (Akka, Erlang/OTP, or similar), including cluster operation, not just local single-node usage. Experience with async/reactive database access patterns (ReactiveMongo or equivalent reactive-driver experience). Demonstrated ownership of at least one payment, billing, or other compliance-sensitive integration in production. Strong distributed-systems judgment: can reason about race conditions, idempotency under retry/duplicate delivery, and compatibility across a rolling deploy without being prompted. Preferred Qualifications Experience in iGaming, sweepstakes, or other regulated real-money gaming. Experience with real-time, low-latency, or WebSocket-heavy backend systems. Experience maintaining and evolving a legacy codebase (10+ years) without a rewrite. Experience with MongoDB operations beyond query-writing — indexing strategy, replica set behavior under load.