Senior/Lead Backend Engineer - NYC at Medal

About MedalAt Medal, we’re redefining the way gamers connect, share, and relive their greatest in-game moments. Our platform makes it easy to clip, edit, and share gaming content—whether you're capturing a legendary headshot or just hanging with friends in voice chat. Over 2 million gamers use Medal every month to showcase their moments, and we’re just getting started.We're a fast-moving team backed by top-tier investors. Our culture is builder-first: we move quickly, make decisions with creators in mind, and aren’t afraid to challenge conventions when it improves the product.The RoleMedal’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 WillDesign and develop backend systems and REST APIs that serve millions of users and billions of clipsOwn features end-to-end: from design and architecture through implementation and deploymentWork closely with cross-functional teams across product, ML, and mobile to build cohesive experiencesScale our systems to support growth in users, content volume, and featuresLead engineering projects, drive architectural decisions, and mentor junior and mid-level backend engineersHelp maintain our cloud infrastructure and CI/CD pipelinesOptimize databases, APIs, and services for performance, scalability, and costContribute to technical strategy, roadmap, and team-wide best practicesYou Need5+ years of backend engineering experience, with significant time in production environmentsStrong proficiency in Java and hands-on experience building scalable microservicesDeep understanding of RESTful API design and distributed systemsExperience with relational databases like MySQL or PostgreSQL (including performance tuning and schema design)Experience building systems that handle thousands of requests per secondComfort with cloud infrastructure (GCP or AWS preferred), CI/CD, and infrastructure as codeStrong grasp of system design, architectural patterns, and security best practicesStrong communication and leadership skills, with the ability to drive cross-team projectsBonus PointsExperience with Redis, RabbitMQ, or other message brokers and caching systemsFamiliarity with Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, and modern DevOps practicesExperience with observability tools and performance monitoringExposure to ElasticSearch, BigQuery, or other data warehouse toolsContributions to open-source projectsA passion for games and gaming communitiesOur StackBackend: Java, Redis, RabbitMQ, Kubernetes, TerraformCloud: Google Cloud Platform, AWSFrontend: Electron, React, ReduxNative: C#, C++, Swift, KotlinCI/CD & Infra: GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Salt, DockerWhy Join UsAt 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.#LI-DH1