Job Description
HyperHug is an international game development studio specializing in the shooter genre. Our main office is based in Cyprus, but our talented team works remotely from around the world. We’re developing Oxide: Survival Island, an immersive multiplayer survival shooter for mobile platforms, and we’re always looking for motivated individuals who want to grow with us, contribute their creativity, and help shape the future of our games.
We are seeking an experienced Senior Backend Developer to join our team and contribute to the development and evolution of our flagship game, Oxide: Survival Island.
What You’ll Be Doing:
Build and operate multiple backend services in C# / .NET — game-facing APIs, player profiles, the in-game catalogue and economy, clans, chat, server orchestration, monetisation and player support. Most features cross service boundaries.
Own a slice of the analytics / data plane. Design schemas in an OLAP / columnar store, model ingestion pipelines that handle late-arriving updates and partial re-deliveries, build cohort / retention / ROAS / LTV aggregates, and surface them through a BI tool the LiveOps and marketing teams read every day.
Integrate monetisation and attribution. Receipt validation against the major mobile stores, reconciliation of payments from a third-party gateway, processing of attribution + cost data from a mobile-measurement provider. Catching missed callbacks, deduplicating noisy retries and gracefully recovering from refunds is where you’ll spend more time than building the happy path.
Run real-time systems. A real-time pub-sub layer pushes chat, notifications and game-server events to clients; a key-value store backs sessions, last-seen indexes and leaderboards; cache invalidation across services is event-driven. You should be comfortable choosing the right pattern for each of these and tuning them under load.
Operate hundreds of dedicated game servers. A game-server panel exposes provisioning, draining, health and metrics. You’ll write the backend logic that decides what runs where, surfaces incidents to operators and reroutes players when servers degrade.
Build the internal admin / LiveOps console. When LiveOps needs a new editor — for a config, an A/B test, a region setting, a chat filter, a remote popup — whoever built the backend side usually builds the UI side too. We don’t keep a separate front-end team for this.
Run on Google Cloud. Services are containerised; data lives in managed stores; artefacts and ETL drops sit in object storage. You’re expected to be at home there without being a Kubernetes specialist.
Pair with Unity engineers on the contract between client and server, and make sure the server stays the source of truth — most anti-cheat work is enforced on the backend.
What We Expect From You:
5+ years of backend experience, with at least one live, monetised product shipped end-to-end. Direct mobile-games experience is preferred but a strong ad-tech, fintech or marketplace background with the right instincts also fits.
Strong C# / .NET, including modern language features, async/await, performance intuition for allocations and HTTP client pooling, and comfort with dependency injection and the options pattern. (We use .NET 8 today, but the language version isn’t the point.)
Experience with an OLAP / columnar database used in anger — ClickHouse, BigQuery, Druid, Pinot, or similar. You can design a schema that survives late-arriving data, reason about idempotent ETL, and read a query plan when something gets slow.
Experience with a document store and a key-value / pub-sub store in production — MongoDB, DynamoDB, Cosmos, etc. for the document side; Redis, KeyDB, Memcached and friends for caching and pub-sub. You should be able to articulate when to reach for which.
A working mental model of real-time and distributed systems — backpressure, idempotency, watermarks, eventual consistency, and the difference between a cache miss and a true source-of-truth read. The specific transport (WebSocket bus, message queue, gRPC stream) matters less than that you’ve felt the failure modes.
Pragmatism with messy real-world data. Attribution feeds, payment webhooks and ad-network reports are noisy, late and occasionally wrong. We want someone who finds that interesting rather than annoying.
Comfort across the stack. You won’t always be writing server code. Some days you’ll be writing SQL for an analyst, an admin screen for LiveOps, an alert rule for incident response, or a config migration script.
English - B1+ level, Russian - C1 level.
Bonus If You Have:
Shipped a live-service mobile game through a season or event cycle.
Game-server orchestration experience — any of Pterodactyl, Agones, GameLift, Nakama or custom Kubernetes-based fleets.
Mobile attribution / cost ETL integration in your past (AppsFlyer, Adjust, Singular, Branch) — particularly the painful parts.
Internal admin UI experience with any modern web framework (Blazor, React, Vue, Svelte). The shape of the work matters more than the framework.
What We Offer:
Competitive salary.
Relocation support to Cyprus, including visa and housing assistance.
Monthly lunch allowances via Wolt.
Health benefits - comprehensive medical insurance and SportBenefit membership.
Car rental.
Greek lessons.
School fee contribution for children.
A passionate and supportive team that values creativity and ownership.
Opportunities for professional growth.
A culture built on initiative, transparency, and collaboration.
