Backend Engineer
Backend engineer on Papaya Gaming's WildCard squad in Tel Aviv, building and owning high-scale backend features (store, collectibles, rankings, social layer, in-game economy) for a skill-based mobile gaming platform serving millions of players. Day-to-day spans design, production ownership, A/B testing, and AI-assisted development with Node.js, TypeScript, AWS, Kubernetes, Redis, and MySQL.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Tel Aviv-Yafo, Tel Aviv District
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Not specified
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 3+ years
- Category
- Backend
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 3+ years hands-on experience designing, architecting, and developing complex server applications
- B.Sc. in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a highly related technical field
- Demonstrated cloud expertise with substantial practical experience in major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
- Experience in at least one major backend development language (NodeJS, Java, or C#)
- Drive to evaluate and adopt cutting-edge technologies to solve complex engineering challenges
- Solid grasp of data modeling and caching: relational databases (MySQL) and Redis
- Proactive, problem-solving mindset with commitment to execution excellence and production-ready code
- Hands-on use of AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot or similar) in real production work
Nice to have
- Extensive experience designing, building, and maintaining high-scale, high-throughput distributed systems
- Prior background in the mobile industry, particularly mobile gaming or large-scale B2C mobile platforms
- Data-driven product work: A/B tests, working with BI, analytics in SQL (e.g. Snowflake)
Full description
Papaya is a leading skill-based mobile gaming company, bringing together fun, competition, and real rewards for millions of players worldwide.
Driven by our vision to create one of the world’s most exciting player communities, we develop games powered by a large-scale B2C platform that supports tens of millions of daily tournaments and connects players around the world through social competitions.
Located in the heart of Tel Aviv, we offer a fast-moving environment, culture of innovation, professional growth, and the opportunity to make a true impact. We are looking for people who play for real and want to shape the future of gaming with us.
About the Team:
WildCard is a product-facing backend squad in our Features Tribe. We own the systems that keep players coming back beyond the prize: the Store, Collectibles, Ranking & Seasons, the Friends social layer and the Gold Nuggets in-game economy. We work closely with Client (Unity) developers, Product and BI. Everything we ship is A/B tested and configured live through our internal back-office tool.
In this role, you'll design and build game features that keep players engaged over the long term by giving them memorable, enjoyable experiences beyond winning rewards. You'll work closely with Client developers, Product and BI to design, ship and measure features that directly affect our global player base. You'll also make our systems scale better and cost less, by building heavy API call volumes and taming request spikes when a new event goes live.
Responsibilities
- Build and own a high-scale backend platform for millions of users.
- Lead solutions end to end, from challenging the requirements through design and production to measuring the results, with designs that shorten time-to-market.
- Own your systems in production: set up honest, actionable alerts and find the root cause of every bug.
- Build with AI every day: use Claude Code and our internal agent tooling to design, write, test, review and debug code. Help shape how the team uses it, including shared skills, internal connectors and agent workflows.
- Try out new technologies, tools and 3rd-party frameworks, and adopt them where they fit to deliver state-of-the-art tech.
- Tech stack: AWS, Kubernetes, Node.js, TypeScript, Redis, MySQL
Requirements
- Minimum of 3+ years of proven, hands-on experience in the design, architecture, and development of complex server applications.
- B.Sc. in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a highly related technical field.
- Demonstrated expertise in cloud environment, with substantial practical experience operating within major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
- Experience in at least one major backend development language (specifically NodeJS, Java, or C#).