Senior/Lead Backend Engineer
Medal, Highlight, & General Intuition Jobs • New York City, NY, United StatesAbout Medal
Medal is the world’s largest and fastest-growing platform for gaming clips, where millions of gamers capture, share, and relive their best moments. Every year, our players record billions of clips, each representing a unique, action-packed highlight. We’re building the next generation of gaming communities — social, monetized, and creator-powered. Our mission is to design products that make sharing, discovering, and connecting around gaming moments seamless and fun.
We raised a seed round of $133M from General Catalyst and Khosla to discover the next generation of intelligence.
The Role
Medal’s backend powers everything from real-time in-app communications and storage of billions of user-generated clips, to our ML-based feed and social features. We’re looking for a Senior or Lead Backend Engineer to help us scale and evolve this infrastructure as we grow.
In this role, you'll work closely with product, infra, and data teams to architect and build highly scalable, low-latency systems. You'll help design critical APIs, evolve our backend infrastructure, mentor other engineers, and drive technical decisions that impact millions of users.
If you love building resilient systems, thinking about architecture at scale, and want to work on a product that blends gaming, content, and community—this role is for you.
You Will
Design and develop backend systems and REST APIs that serve millions of users and billions of clips
Own features end-to-end: from design and architecture through implementation and deployment
Work closely with cross-functional teams across product, ML, and mobile to build cohesive experiences
Scale our systems to support growth in users, content volume, and features
Lead engineering projects, drive architectural decisions, and mentor junior and mid-level backend engineers
Help maintain our cloud infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines
Optimize databases, APIs, and services for performance, scalability, and cost
Contribute to technical strategy, roadmap, and team-wide best practices
You Need
5+ years of backend engineering experience, with significant time in production environments
Strong proficiency in Java and hands-on experience building scalable microservices
Deep understanding of RESTful API design and distributed systems
Experience with relational databases like MySQL or PostgreSQL (including performance tuning and schema design)
Experience building systems that handle thousands of requests per second
Comfort with cloud infrastructure (GCP or AWS preferred), CI/CD, and infrastructure as code
Strong grasp of system design, architectural patterns, and security best practices
Strong communication and leadership skills, with the ability to drive cross-team projects
Bonus Points
Experience with Redis, RabbitMQ, or other message brokers and caching systems
Familiarity with Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, and modern DevOps practices
Experience with observability tools and performance monitoring
Exposure to ElasticSearch, BigQuery, or other data warehouse tools
Contributions to open-source projects
A passion for games and gaming communities
Our Stack
Backend: Java, Redis, RabbitMQ, Kubernetes, Terraform
Cloud: Google Cloud Platform, AWS
Frontend: Electron, React, Redux
Native: C#, C++, Swift, Kotlin
CI/CD & Infra: GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Salt, Docker
Benefits
Competitive salary and meaningful equity
Comprehensive health insurance including dental and vision insurance
401k
Why Join Us
At Medal, you’ll have the autonomy to make an impact from Day 1. You’ll join a team that values humility, curiosity, and momentum—and you’ll help shape the future of how gamers share and connect around the moments that matter most.