Staff Software Engineer, Game Development (Unity & Cloud)

Scopely Explore's Engineering team is seeking a Staff Software Engineer, Game Development to provide technical leadership across our Unity-based game clients and cloud-hosted backend services. This role is ideal for an experienced game engineer who thrives in ambiguity, drives architectural decisions, and partners closely with product, design, and game teams to deliver scalable, player-facing systems.

As a Staff Engineer, you will operate beyond individual feature ownership—setting technical direction, influencing multiple teams, and balancing near-term game development needs with long-term platform health and scalability.

• Lead the architecture and implementation of end-to-end game systems spanning Unity client development, backend services, data storage, and cloud infrastructure.

• Drive technical vision and architectural decisions across client and server systems, balancing performance, scalability, and maintainability.

• Partner closely with product, design, and game teams to translate high-level game concepts into concrete, scalable technical solutions.

• Build and evolve shared game services, client frameworks, and backend components used across multiple games or features.

• Influence technical standards, best practices, and system design across teams through design reviews, documentation, and mentorship.

• Ensure reliability and operational excellence of live games by participating in code reviews, writing tests, and guiding troubleshooting and incident response.

• Mentor engineers across levels and act as a trusted technical leader within cross-functional teams.

• Required in-office presence: 3 days per week.

• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

• Significant professional experience building and shipping production game systems using Unity.

• Strong experience designing and operating backend game services using Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or similar cloud infrastructure.

• Proven ability to lead technical initiatives across multiple systems or teams, with a track record of influencing architecture and execution.

• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment, adapt to changing priorities, and solve complex problems with limited advance context.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with experience collaborating across engineering, product, and design.

• Must have shipped at least 3 titles on Mobile, PC/Mac, or Console

• Must have a passion for Pokémon Go

• Experience building and operating live games at scale.

• Experience working with geospatial data, player data, analytics pipelines, or live-ops systems.

• Experience shaping tactical and strategic product direction as a senior technical partner.

• Experience mentoring senior engineers and leading cross-team technical initiatives.

For candidates in CA, CO, NJ, NY, and WA, the annual salary range is provided below. In addition to base pay, employees may be eligible for equity, bonuses, and a comprehensive benefits package, including healthcare benefits, retirement benefits, pet insurance, paid holidays, paid Scopely free days, and unlimited paid time off. Base pay offered may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.

CA, CO, NJ, NY, and WA Annual Salary Range

$169,000—$253,000 USD

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