The Role
We're building our platform to power Piing’s next generation of mass-participation games which we run at the biggest stadiums and venues in the world... and we're just getting started!
We're looking for a Senior Engineer with serious backend and cloud engineering experience. You'll be one of three senior engineers collaborating closely to architect and build our next-generation platform from the ground up. We're in the early stages of development and this is your chance to shape our foundations.
This isn't a role where you'll be handed a design and asked to implement it. You’ll be key in designing, building and maintaining event-driven, high-concurrency systems and complex architectures, helping create the services to deploy and manage our games globally and get tens of thousands of players connected to the same real-time experiences on some of the biggest screens in the most prestigious sporting venues around the world. We’ll also be building APIs and microservices, dashboards, portals, internal tooling across the platform, managing a fleet of GPU-accelerated game servers which will stream our live Unity experiences over WebRTC to stadium screens and tackling whatever comes next. If that sounds like a lot, it is. We're looking for someone who reads this and grins!
The role is weighted firmly to the backend and cloud and we need someone who raises the ceiling of the dev team's knowledge, not someone looking to grow into it. If you know how the web really works: HTTP; networking; servers under load; cloud at scale; and can ship frontend when the situation demands it, read on.
Being into sports isn’t a prerequisite for this role. What we want are people who are excited about what we do and joining us on this journey.
About Us
Piing makes games for crowds: BIG games on BIG screens creating BIG engagement: 50,000+ player games played on big screens at the greatest events on Earth, played by fans using their phones as controllers, all through the browser. In 2025 we were at Glastonbury, Wimbledon, F1 and football across the planet. In 2026, we will be at the biggest football event in the world, breaking into new sports and territories, slowly making the world more fun one game at a time and continuing on our journey of entertaining fans at the greatest events on Earth.
We’re a small talented team with a strict No Assholes Policy to hiring - and that goes for the founders and our investors too ;)
About You
You've lived and breathed the web stack for a significant portion of your life, we’re talking 8-15 years in the industry. The depth we're looking for isn't on a CV checklist, it's the kind that only comes from years of production experience, hard lessons and systems that had to hold under real pressure.
Team
This is the most important one. When something goes wrong, we sort it. No finger pointing, no politics, just fix it, learn and move on. You’re happy to share what you think, discuss the pros and cons, listen to others and help us bring out the best in each other.
Backend and Cloud at Depth
Node.js and TypeScript are your primary tools and you know them inside out, not just the syntax, but how the runtime actually behaves and how to configure and debug TypeScript projects. On the infrastructure side, you own AWS rather than just consume it: security groups, CIDR blocks, VPC design, IAM, multi-service orchestration. You've operated at a scale where the infrastructure itself became the constraint. Security and compliance are a default and you understand why regional deployment decisions matter - latency, data residency, GDPR, sovereignty. You've designed and owned event-driven systems in production - for example Lambda, SQS, SNS, EventBridge, AppSync. You used a variety of these at scale.
Infrastructure Depth
We care less about which tools you've used and more about how deep you've gone. If you've hit real infrastructure limits in production and had to work through them, you'll know what we mean.
Testing at Scale
You've load-tested systems to serious concurrency.
Databases at Scale
You've dealt with databases under real load, understand query optimisation, write contention, normal forms, sharding, replication. You know the strengths of different technologies: when PostgreSQL is the right call, DynamoDB makes more sense, or when Redis is the answer and you've been in production long enough to know the difference between a schema that looks right and one that holds up and performs well.
Caching and the Full Request Path
You understand cache layers from origin through CDN to the browser. Not just that they exist, but how to use them correctly, when they help and when they bite you. DNS, SSL, the full request lifecycle is standard territory.
Observability
You know what good observability looks like and you've plumbed it in yourself with structured logging, alerting, dashboards, tracing.
Frontend Competence
You understand how the frontend actually works. The JavaScript event loop, the DOM, CSS rendering, how the browser ticks. You're not a frontend specialist, but you can build and deploy production React apps. Hooks, lifecycle and component architecture are familiar ground. You're comfortable owning dashboards, internal tooling and other frontend work when the situation calls for it. When something breaks, you can follow a network request from the browser all the way down to the infrastructure.
Git
You know your way around Git beyond the basics. You’re comfortable manipulating history and handling complex interactions like solving merge conflicts, interactive rebasing and using branching workflows.
Comfortable in the Trenches
The Linux CLI is a familiar place. You've written bash scripts, built custom server images with Docker and EC2 and solved problems well outside your comfort zone when the situation demanded it. You don't wait for someone else to figure it out.
Tech Stack
At our core we're TypeScript, Node.js and AWS. Deep AWS knowledge is non-negotiable - we're talking things like: compute, networking, service-to-service auth, storage, messaging, CDN, serverless and scaling load balanced servers when required. We use Pulumi for IaC; if you know Terraform etc, you'll be fine. Our stack will evolve and we care most of all about depth of knowledge.
Key Responsibilities
Platform Architecture & build (primary focus)
Collaborate with our CTO and Senior Engineer to make key architectural decisions and build our next-generation platform from the ground up. Design systems, infrastructure and establish the technical foundations that our future team will build on.
Backend and Infrastructure
Design, build and high-concurrency, low-latency backend services and cloud infrastructure on AWS.
Existing Products (secondary)
Not day to day, but support our existing products if help is required, although the bulk of our energy is focusing on the new platform.
Testing and Reliability
Implement unit tests when it makes sense and conduct load testing at scale. You know the difference between a system that looks healthy and one that actually holds.
Developer Experience
Improve tooling, workflows and documentation across our projects - laying the groundwork for a team that will grow around this platform.
This Role Isn't For You If...
You've worked with AWS but haven't designed and owned complex infrastructure end to end.
Your experience is primarily frontend or mid-stack - this role is firmly weighted in the backend and cloud.
You're most comfortable being given a technical spec to implement rather than helping define it.
You haven't shipped and operated high-concurrency systems in production under real load.
You're looking for a large team, established processes or a clear management track.
What We Value
Ownership: We want someone who takes pride in what they build and sees it through.
Collaboration: Three senior engineers, working closely, on the same page. Everyone's input shapes what we build.
Honesty: We say what we think, ask when we're unsure and learn from each other.
Fun: We make games for crowds. We enjoy the process. Life's too short not to.
Interested?
If this role sounds like you, we'd love to hear from you.
Please send your CV and a covering letter to jobs@piing.events with the subject line: SeniorEngineer2026.
The covering letter matters to us. Tell us who you are, what draws you to Piing. Tell us about a system or project you've owned that you're genuinely proud of. Team fit is as important as technical ability here.
If we think there's a match, Jamie and a member of the team will be in touch to arrange a call.