Backend Engineer

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.

• 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

• 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#).
• A relentless 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.
• A highly proactive, problem-solving mindset with a strict commitment to execution excellence and delivering production-ready code.
• Hands-on use of AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot or similar) in real production work, not just autocomplete. You can explain how you break down tasks for an agent, give it the right context, and check its output.

Advantages 

• Extensive experience designing, building, and maintaining high-scale, high-throughput distributed systems.
• Prior background working within the mobile industry, particularly in mobile gaming or large-scale B2C mobile platforms.
• Data-driven product work: A/B tests, working with BI, analytics in SQL (e.g. Snowflake).