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SuperCity is a cross-platform city-builder with over 30 million players and a 14+ year history, running on 8 platforms.
Every server error can cost our players their time — and us real revenue. That’s why we place a strong emphasis on stability, performance, and reliability.
To help us evolve our backend, maintain a high-load production system, and deliver new engaging features and game mechanics, the SuperCity team is looking for a Senior Backend Developer (PHP).
Position at
Responsibilities
Backend Development
- Develop and maintain backend services using PHP.
- Work with a high-load production system (~100k DAU).
- Extend and support a monolithic backend architecture, improving stability and scalability.
Architecture & APIs
- Design, implement, and maintain APIs and internal service interactions.
- Work with API contracts based on JSON Schema.
- Use jRPC for internal communication between system components.
Infrastructure & Data
- Work with MongoDB, Redis, AWS, and Centrifugo.
- Optimize data storage, caching strategies, and background processes.
- Ensure system reliability under real production load.
Performance & Monitoring
- Analyze system performance using Grafana and other monitoring tools.
- Identify bottlenecks, degradation points, and inefficiencies.
- Optimize queries, caching layers, and heavy backend flows.
Required Qualifications
- Strong commercial experience with PHP backend development (5+ years).
- Experience in GameDev or other high-load backend systems.
- Solid understanding of OOP and software design principles.
- Hands-on experience with MongoDB and Redis.
- Experience working with AWS.
- Ability to analyze metrics and work with monitoring tools such as Grafana.
- Understanding of API contracts and JSON Schema.
- Experience with jRPC or similar RPC/API approaches.
- Strong understanding of high-load system challenges, including:
- Caching strategies
- Concurrency and race conditions
- Fault tolerance
- Scalability
- Bottleneck identification
- Comfortable working with monolithic architectures and evolving them without disruptive rewrites.
Nice to Have
- Experience with real-time systems like Centrifugo.
- Experience supporting live game servers, live-ops, and event-driven logic.
- Experience profiling and optimizing PHP applications.
- Understanding of CI/CD, observability, and production workflows.
- Experience with evolutionary development of legacy systems.
What we offer:
- Work in a stable international company.
- Competitive salary, reviewed every 6 months based on market trends and your performance.
- Flexible work setup: whether you prefer coming to the office, working from home, or a hybrid of the two, the choice is yours.
- Flexible benefits: an annual $1000 to spend on perks, including health insurance, sports, therapy, education and language classes.
- Full pay during sick leaves and personal leaves, in addition to 20 working days of vacation annually.
- Open statistics, including earnings from our games.
- An epic team ready to share their experience and knowledge.