Senior / Lead Backend Engineer

ABOUT MEDAL Millions of gamers capture, share, and discover new games on Medal, the largest platform for gaming clips. Our mission is to design products that make sharing and connecting around gaming seamless and fun, and build a place where brands and game publishers can reach high-quality gamers to grow their products. Medal's data powers General Intuition, the frontier research lab that recently raised $320M at a $2.3B valuation led by Khosla Ventures with participation from General Catalyst, Eric Schmidt, and Jeff Bezos. 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. You'll work closely with product, infra, and data teams to architect and build highly scalable, low-latency systems, helping design critical APIs, evolving our backend infrastructure, mentoring other engineers, and driving technical decisions that impact millions of users. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 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 - Relational databases: Experience with 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: Redis, RabbitMQ, or other message brokers and caching systems; SRE/DevOps or DevSecOps experience OUR STACK Electron, React, Redux, Styled Components & other modern web-based technologies C# and C++ for native windows recording & more Swift for iOS, Kotlin for Android Java, Redis, RabbitMQ, Kubernetes for backend Terraform, Salt, GitHub Actions, CircleCI for IaC and CI/CD