Senior Software Engineer (Portugal & Remote)

At Arkadium our purpose is to have fun while creating fun - and that’s exactly what we’ve been doing for 20 years. We’re the creators behind the world’s most-played games. From the Solitaire that came on your Windows machine, to hundreds of other games you’ve come to know and love - you can find our games on Arkadium.com, iOS, Android, and lots of other big sites worldwide.

As a proud Evergreen business our values of Fierce Drive, Positive Energy and Living Full Lives are the driving force behind how we run and the choices we make.

We’re privately held (aka stable and reasonable about growth), founder-led (aka passionate about our craft) and we consistently rank as a “Best Place to Work” (aka not your typical games company).

We’ve been recognised by "Happiness Works 2023, 2024, 2025" in Portugal, "Crain's Best Places to Work 2022" and "Great Place to Work 2022 and 2023" in New York!

Interested in becoming an Arkadian? We’d love to hear from you!

Overview

Arkadium is seeking an exceptional and experienced Senior Full-Stack Engineer to join our Core Tech team.

Core Tech operates as a backend-first team, building and evolving the shared services that enable a lot of the core functionalities in Arkadium’s games and platforms - from authentication, chat, tournaments, friends, inventory, and microtransactions, to multiplayer infrastructure (Nakama) and platform-wide capabilities.

What You’ll Do

• Own the technical direction and delivery of complex, scalable full-stack systems used by live games.
• Design and make architectural decisions for backend and frontend systems, balancing performance, scalability, and long-term maintainability.
• Build and evolve backend services and APIs that power real-time, live-operated games.
• Integrate backend systems with web-based frontends and browser games.
• Act as a force multiplier for internal game teams by building shared services, frameworks, and developer tools.
• Design, implement, and maintain reliable data models, ensuring correctness, security, and performance at scale.
• Identify performance bottlenecks across the stack and proactively drive optimizations.
• Define and enforce security standards around authentication, authorization, and data protection.
• Set engineering quality standards through code reviews, architectural guidance, and hands-on mentorship.
• Produce clear technical documentation and decision records to enable long-term ownership and knowledge transfer.
• Stay current with modern backend, frontend, and infrastructure practices and actively raise the technical bar of the team.
• Collaborate closely in an agile environment, contributing to planning, execution, and continuous improvement.