In Job Posting Review we take a quick, or sometimes detailed, look at a public job posting and comment on it. Since job postings come and go, a copy is listed here where we break it down. If you are the hiring manager and think I am wrong, please reach out to me for corrections or details.
What’s interesting about this post is that the Arc Raiders matchmaking system works really, really well. It’s quick with barely any wait times and has advanced mechanisms such as aggression based matchmaking. Working on this team would really put you in a high tier of matchmaking excellence. The game has continued to grow from launch and I rarely see matchmaking issues. Even streamers with likely a high MMR have very low wait times. A large player population certainly helps, but I see some streamers play on lower population regions as well.
From Wikipedia:
Embark Studios AB is a Swedish video game developer based in Stockholm and founded in 2018. Its founders include former DICE employees Magnus Nordin, Rob Runesson, Stefan Strandberg, Patrick Söderlund, Jenny Huldschiner and Johan Andersson.[1] Embark is a subsidiary of the South Korean video game publisher Nexon since 2021. The company is most known for developing The Finals and ARC Raiders.
The Post is here: https://careers.embark-studios.com/jobs/6311281-backend-engineer-go-matchmaking
My comments/insights/guesses are highlighted in yellow.
Backend Engineer (Go) – Matchmaking
As a Backend Engineer at Embark you will be an integral part of a highly creative game team focused on building powerful and reusable infrastructure and backend components for our games.
A nice opener and it’s nice to see that this is part of the creative game team over a centralized matchmaking team.
Here you will have the opportunity to take initiative and drive finding solutions to exciting challenges, building the services that power our games, making sure they scale and continuously improve on them.
Pretty standard stuff.
As our game is distributed between game client, game server and the cloud, you’ll work together with your team to figure out which parts of the problem to solve in which location. At Embark we believe in creating smaller teams of well-aligned experts that can be trusted to create games and keep them running.
“which parts of the problem to solve in which location” is interesting. What problems are there and is this referring to player location/region? Looks like high autonomy as well which is great.
You will be working mainly on matchmaking, but also, data analytic, game client, backend service infrastructures, etc. Some of the technologies we use to make all of those are Go, C++, GCP, Bazel, Kubernetes, Grafana, Google Spanner.
Ok so the backend in Go on Google Cloud with Kubernetes. Data analytics likely on spanner on GCP with a Grafana front end. Bazel – just guessing this is the build system for Matchmaking and C++ for game client code. Honestly seems pretty solid.
Example of responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate matchmaking features, services, and developer tools
- Own matchmaking systems in production, ensuring scalability, reliability, and performance for live games
- Drive technical design and architecture of matchmaking flows across client, game server, and backend services
- Collaborate with other backend services, gameplay, and infrastructure teams to resolve matchmaking challenges
- Partner with data analysts to evaluate matchmaking quality and drive data-informed improvements
Seems pretty straightforward responsibilities in a You Build It, You Run It mindset. Interesting that a back end engineer would drive technical design and architecture across client, game server, and backend but maybe that makes sense as full matchmaking ownership.
We would love if you have
- A creative and curious mindset with a passion for interactive experiences, games, and new technologies
- Solid understanding of designing, building, and operating complex distributed systems, with performance, scalability, and observability in mind
- Comfortable working across domains, including backend services, data analytics, game clients, infrastructure, and observability
- Professional experience with Go and modern backend technologies
- A collaborative mindset with strong communication skills and the ability to work effectively in cross-disciplinary teams
- Interest in taking initiatives and driving finding solutions to exciting challenges
- Professional English communication skills
Additionally, we think it would be a great bonus if you are
- Experience building or operating matchmaking systems, or similar large-scale, player-facing services
- Familiar with data analytics and able to support your hypotheses with data-driven insights
While the above is relatively straight forward, it seems like this might be a pretty tough role to actually fill. The amount of folks who have worked across all of this in the industry is relatively small, but maybe if you cross off matchmaking this is a lot easier role to fill. You are going to need someone pretty senior to fill this job description. And you have to be in Sweden or willing to relocate.
At Embark we offer competitive salaries, passionate colleagues to share knowledge with and much more, but most of all we invite you to take part of a journey into the unknown, to build creative, surprising and beautiful experiences together.
We welcome game makers of all sex, class, colour, age, gender identity, education, religion, opinion, culture, nation of origin, language, sexual orientation, shape, size, and ability.
Did we leave anyone out? Well, we welcome you, too! We think that the gaming industry is made better when everyone has a seat at the table.
Just a really nice few paragraphs. You love to see it.
Be yourself at Embark and make games while doing so. Please apply with confidence. We can’t wait to hear from you (in English)!
Overall this is a really exciting role. You have potentially multiple games to work across (The Finals, Arc Raiders) and you have scale as well as one of the top games to work on. It also seems like genuinely a great place to work. You’ll be working on what is likely a really solid matchmaking system and implementing features that millions of players will use. I’m very curious what matchmaking problems they have, and what features they are looking to implement outside of what is already announced.
Pete Shima 