Horse Reality started eight years ago and now serves a growing community of 500K+ players and 30 Million horses. Our codebase grew right alongside it, some parts working beautifully, others carrying eight years of history. We’re building the technical foundation for the next eight and want your help to do this.

As our Backend & Systems Engineer, you work closely with our Lead Engineer on the bigger challenges: how should our systems work together? What can we simplify? Where do we create problems for our future selves? All while handling up to 50 million requests every day! Once we know where we want to go, you take ownership of turning that direction into working software and infrastructure.

Our stack: PHP, Golang, MariaDB, MongoDB, Redis, Docker, Git, Web Components and JavaScript.

What you’ll work on

Some examples of the sorts of projects that could be your responsibility:

1. Identify a coherent subset of functionality, from a monolithic application where we can get substantial improvements by migrating to a concurrent-safe performant microservice. Design and document APIs to support the migration. Build out or support other engineers building out the functionality on both sides of the API, including automated testing. Specify associated infrastructure as code and then shepherd through internal and public test environments to production.
2. Introduce new technologies or approaches to our stack – for example better monitoring, an event bus or search databases – and drive their adoption in relevant places in the code base, including removing alternatives that aren’t working so well. Help us consolidate to using a few powerful tools well.
3. Through discussion, reading code and internal management tooling (e.g. Jira) gain a good understanding of the entire application, direction and priorities, to ensure your work is targeted and delivers solutions to some of our biggest pain points. Use that understanding to suggest improvements and contribute to the prioritisation process. On the rare occasions when incident management or disaster recovery is required, support the response or take the lead.

How you work

Technical experience matters, but how you use it matters just as much. We think we’re a match if:

• You think before you build. Understand the problem first, then choose the right solution and are able to explain why.
• You see the whole system. You connect performance, security and scalability.
• You solve bigger problems together. Bounce ideas with other engineers, explain your reasoning and speak up when you see a better route.
• You can take it from here. Once we agree on a direction, you can turn it into results without someone looking over your shoulder.
• You simplify things and choose clear, maintainable solutions over complexity.
• You test assumptions and verify it works instead of “hoping they do”.

What we’re looking for

You bring strong engineering experience and feel comfortable working with:

• PHP and/or Golang
• Relational and/or NoSQL databases
• Git, Docker and Linux
• Monitoring, logging and debugging
• Automated testing
• DevOps as part of building and maintaining software

Note that you don’t need experience with -every- technology in our stack. If you have strong system thinking and the ability to learn deliberately it matters more to us than ticking every box.

One hard requirement: You already live in the Netherlands and have the right to work here. We don’t offer visa sponsorship or relocation for this role.

Even better if you…

• Know your way around search databases, event-driven architectures, time-series databases, Sentry or Datadog.
• Speak Dutch, but we don’t require it.
• Have experience in the games industry. Knowing far too much about horses also counts ;

Apply now by sending your motivation letter and resume to info@studiodeloryan.com