Backend Engineer (Intermediate)

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 an Intermediate Backend Engineer to contribute to the design, development, and operation of our next-generation social gaming platform. You'll work on concurrent systems, building APIs and backend services that power millions of players. This is a hands-on role where you'll solve meaningful problems, write clean and performant code, and collaborate closely with senior engineers and leadership.

This is a growth-oriented backend engineering role for someone who wants to deepen their skills on systems that operate at scale. You will work close to the core of the platform, contributing to 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 eager to grow into increasing levels of ownership.

Responsibilities

• Bring an AI-forward engineering mindset, using modern AI-assisted development and automation practices to improve engineering velocity, code quality, and team leverage.

• Contribute to the design, delivery, and operational health of scalable Laravel/PHP backend systems, including production readiness (observability, alerting, runbooks, incident response), release safety, performance management, and reliability improvement.

• Build platform capabilities that support real-time gameplay, transactional workflows, and business-critical operations.

• Support the evolution of the backend architecture, helping decompose monolithic components into well-bounded services where it improves scalability, reliability, delivery speed, or domain ownership.

• Develop secure and reliable APIs and service contracts, following team standards for versioning, idempotency, failure handling, and backward compatibility.

• Improve system performance through solid database design, query optimization, caching, queueing, asynchronous processing, and careful management of transactional boundaries.

• Partner with infrastructure and senior engineers to strengthen CI/CD, automated testing, monitoring, alerting, and production support practices.

• Follow and help raise backend engineering standards for code quality, secure development, documentation, maintainability, and operational ownership.

• Participate in design reviews, code reviews, and knowledge-sharing with teammates.

Required Qualifications & Experience

• 3–5 years of backend engineering experience, including meaningful involvement in production systems.

• Solid 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.

• Good understanding of production data stores, including PostgreSQL/MySQL or comparable relational databases, with some exposure to NoSQL systems such as DynamoDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, Redis, or Elasticsearch.

• Working knowledge of data modeling, indexing, query optimization, transaction boundaries, consistency tradeoffs, caching, queueing, asynchronous processing, and scalable system design.

• Familiarity with AWS or equivalent cloud platforms, CI/CD, observability, alerting, and production operations.

• Good communication and collaboration skills, including participating in design reviews, code reviews, and cross-functional teamwork.

Preferred Skills & Nice-to-Haves

• Exposure to 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.

• Exposure to high-availability, low-latency, or real-time systems.

• Familiarity with containers and orchestration platforms such as Docker, ECS, or Kubernetes.

• Analytical skills, including mathematical, statistical, or data-informed problem solving.

Education & Location

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or related discipline.

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.

• Grow your backend engineering skills with mentorship from senior and staff-level engineers.

• Work in a high-growth environment with opportunities for learning, ownership, and career progression.

• Receive competitive compensation and a comprehensive benefits package.