Lead Server Engineer

SciPlay is a leading developer and publisher of digital games on mobile and web platforms, providing highly entertaining free-to-play games that millions of people play every day for their authenticity, engagement and fun.

SciPlay currently offers nine core games, including social casino games Jackpot Party Casino, Gold Fish Casino Slots, Hot Shot Casino and Quick Hit Slots, and casual games MONOPOLY Slots, Bingo Showdown, 88 Fortunes Slots, Backgammon Live and Solitaire Pet Adventure with offices all over the world!

Position Summary

About The Role

We're hiring a Lead Server Engineer for Gold Fish Casino Slots. It's a nine-figure-revenue PHP codebase that's been shipping continuously for over a decade. Here's the honest version: the codebase has history. Ten years of overlapping initiatives, partial migrations, and code that needs love sitting next to code that does its job well. The job is making this codebase substantially better, not keeping it from getting worse. We're being selective. We care more about finding the right person than filling the seat quickly.

Technical depth is the minimum bar. The harder thing this role asks for is judgment about where to spend it. You need to be able to discern priorities at two levels. The first is technical execution order across a long arc of work: what unblocks what, what's safe to ship in isolation, what needs to wait. The second is your own scope: what to take on yourself, what to design and hand off, what to coordinate across the team. Most strong engineers can do one. We need someone who does both.

You'll work with engineering leadership on roadmap and tradeoffs. You set technical standards by example, mentor mid-level engineers through complex work, and write code. This is a hands-on role, not a planning role.

Beyond the game server, you'll also have influence in our admin tooling stack: a PHP backend with jQuery and Vue.js on the front end, which has its own rough edges and its own room for improvement.

Non-Negotiables

You use AI as a power tool, not a teammate. It makes you faster on the parts of the job where speed is the bottleneck: investigation, learning, repetitive work, drafting. You treat its output as a first draft. Understand, test, own. The engineering judgment stays with you. AI doesn't remove it; it demands more of it.

You're an excellent communicator. You surface tradeoffs and risks early, with evidence. Your design docs and PR descriptions are clear enough that engineers can act on them without a meeting. Your code reviews make the team better. You know when to escalate and you do it.

What You'll Need

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant time as a senior or lead engineer on a production system
• Deep PHP, including Composer, dependency injection containers (Symfony DI or equivalent), and static analysis
• You can call priorities at two levels: technical execution order, and your own scope
• You write code that runs in production. You think about load, failure modes, and what keeps us all sleeping at 2AM where we belong.
• Testing judgment. You know when to write a unit test, when to invest in heavier verification, and when to ship behind a flag.
• You've technically led or mentored other engineers. Your code and your reviews set the standard for the team.

About You

• Relentlessly curious. You don't just fix the bug. You figure out how it got there, whether it exists anywhere else, and what the system would look like if it couldn't.
• Critical thinker. You ask why a pattern exists before accepting it, and you pressure-test the first answer before moving on.
• Designs for the codebase that exists. You can hold competing patterns in your head and decide when to converge them and when to leave them alone. You don't propose rewrites you can't ship.
• Team multiplier. You make the engineers around you better through code review, design conversations, and pairing. Not just by writing the hard parts yourself.
• Product-minded. You understand that the code you write is experienced by real players, and that "behavior-preserving refactor" is a phrase that matters.

Bonus Points

• Experience with large-scale architectural refactors on legacy PHP
• Production experience with modern observability stacks (metrics, tracing, profiling, structured logs)
• Experience in the live-service games industry or another high-throughput, revenue-critical consumer service
• Experience with Vue.js or jQuery
• AWS or similar cloud technology

We are SciPlay! We make games!

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