Senior Backend Engineer

Company Punt is a Vancouver-based, founder-led technology company behind two of the largest social casinos in North America. We’re evolving into a prediction-led super app—integrating prediction markets, social gaming, and new product surfaces into a single, cohesive experience. Our backend already operates at scale, processing high-volume, real-money transactions.

We’re building toward a new category: the most advanced and engaging social gaming platform in the world. Role Overview We’re seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to help design, build, and scale our next-generation social gaming platform. You’ll work on highly concurrent systems, architecting APIs and backend services that power millions of players.

This is a hands-on role where you’ll solve complex problems, write clean and performant code, and collaborate closely with senior engineers and leadership. This is a high-impact backend engineering role for someone who wants to build systems that matter at scale. You will work close to the core of the platform, shaping the architecture, reliability, performance, and operational maturity of services that support a fast-growing social gaming business.

We are looking for an engineer who is hands-on, AI-forward, production-minded, and excited to raise the bar for how modern backend systems are designed, shipped, and operated. Responsibilities Bring an AI-forward engineering mindset, using modern AI-assisted development and automation practices to improve engineering velocity, code quality, and team leverage. Own the design, delivery, and operational excellence of scalable Laravel/PHP backend systems, including production readiness (observability, alerting, runbooks, incident response), release safety, performance management, and continuous reliability improvement.

Build high-throughput platform capabilities that support real-time gameplay, transactional workflows, and business-critical operations. Evolve the backend architecture pragmatically, decomposing monolithic components into well-bounded services where it improves scalability, reliability, delivery speed, or domain ownership. Design secure and reliable APIs and service contracts, with clear standards for versioning, idempotency, failure handling, and backward compatibility.

Improve system performance through strong database design, query optimization, caching, queueing, asynchronous processing, and careful management of transactional boundaries. Partner with infrastructure teams to strengthen CI/CD, automated testing, monitoring, alerting, and production support practices. Establish and raise backend engineering standards for code quality, secure development, documentation, maintainability, and operational ownership.

Provide technical leadership through design reviews, code reviews, mentoring, and hands-on guidance for more junior engineers. Required Qualifications & Experience 6+ years of backend engineering experience, including ownership of complex production systems. Strong production experience with Laravel/PHP or comparable backend stacks such as Node.js/TypeScript, Java/Kotlin, Go, Python, Ruby on Rails, or .NET.

Ability to ramp quickly in a Laravel/PHP environment, applying strong backend fundamentals across languages and frameworks. Deep understanding of production data stores, including PostgreSQL/MySQL or comparable relational databases, with exposure to NoSQL systems such as DynamoDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, Redis, or Elasticsearch. Strong grasp of data modeling, indexing, query optimization, transaction boundaries, consistency tradeoffs, caching, queueing, asynchronous processing, and scalable system design.

Experience with AWS or equivalent cloud platforms, CI/CD, observability, alerting, incident response, and production operations. Strong communication and technical leadership skills, including design reviews, code reviews, mentoring, and cross-functional collaboration. Preferred Skills & Nice-to-Haves Experience with event-driven, service-oriented, or distributed backend architectures.

Hands-on experience with caching, messaging, and asynchronous processing using tools such as Redis, RabbitMQ, SQS, Kafka, or similar technologies. Familiarity with DevSecOps, secure coding practices, threat modeling, and production security controls. Experience in gaming, fintech, payments, cryptocurrency, blockchain, or other high-volume transactional platforms.

Experience building or operating high-availability, low-latency, or real-time systems. Experience with containers and orchestration platforms such as Docker, ECS, or Kubernetes. Strong analytical skills, including mathematical, statistical, or data-informed problem solving.

Why Join Us? Help scale a fast-growing social gaming platform with real technical and product impact. Work on high-throughput backend systems where performance, reliability, security, and operational excellence matter.

Join a collaborative engineering team that values strong technical judgment, ownership, and pragmatic architecture. Use modern engineering practices, including AI-assisted development, automation, observability, and cloud-native infrastructure. Influence backend architecture, platform standards, and the technical direction of a growing engineering organization.

Work in a high-growth environment with opportunities for learning, ownership, and leadership. Receive competitive compensation and a comprehensive benefits package.