Senior Server Programmer

As a Senior Server Programmer, you will be part of a team developing highly available back-end systems and servers for large-scale MMO games for our highly prestigious co-development partners.

Third Kind Games - a Virtuos Studio, is a world-class co-development games studio. Third Kind Games was founded in 2016 by a team of nine former Activision veterans and became a Virtuos Studio in 2024.

Our studio is based in Royal Leamington Spa and we also have remote studios in Poland and Spain. Our three studios have been built on the same original spirit and values since our beginning.

We work with some of the biggest names in the games industry such as Blizzard, Amazon, Microsoft and Mythical Games. We’re proud of our track record working on critically acclaimed games and franchises. We are also setting new benchmarks for creativity in the games industry, driving technical expertise in programming alongside creative innovation.

What is it like to be a Third Kinder?

We are a diverse team of people. We are collaborative, open-minded creatives who embrace ideas and knowledge from everyone in our team, with the aim of developing and inspiring ourselves, our projects and our games.

Work life balance and flexibility are very important to us and our team. At TKG we offer a place where our team can be their most creative, imaginative and confident selves. We want all of our team to feel valued, appreciated, and free to be who they are at work. TKG recently received a GOLD Award in Mind Charity’s Workplace Wellbeing Index, recognising our dedication to our team’s mental health and wellbeing.

Role Overview

You enjoy:

• Designing and implementing new features in our core technologies, working collaboratively with other stakeholder teams to understand requirements and identify the best technical solutions.
• Working in a team responsible for designing, developing and maintaining backend services and APIs in Python running on AWS.
• Planning the future of our server core technologies that will lay the foundation for exciting new gameplay features.
• Deep analysis of player behaviours and how our servers can be hardened to both improve player experience and also defend against bad actors (botters, cheaters, intrusions etc).
• Staying up-to-date with industry changes and emerging trends, especially regarding Python, Redis and its ecosystem, AWS, and Gaming.
• Deploying, monitoring and managing applications in a cloud environment such as AWS, inspecting the performance of our server clusters and proposing improvements.
• Mentoring and developing junior team members, fostering a culture of continuous learning and technical excellence.

What we are looking for from a Third Kinder

You would:

• Be capable of working autonomously, gathering your own requirements and creating your own solutions.
• Be capable of learning a new language or technology without guidance.
• Stay abreast of emerging technologies and industry movements.
• Enjoy working with a lot of different technologies, and have a keen desire to learn new ones.
• Be adept at communicating with colleagues and customers to work well as a team.
• Be motivated by creative freedom, ground-breaking initiatives and unknown territory.
• Prefer a creative, open-thinking environment, over one managed through specs and have a passion for working on a wide variety of tasks.
• Be able to work alone and also as part of a team, whilst knowing when to ask for advice from your colleagues.

Skills you need

• Strong knowledge of Linux operating systems and Docker containers, as well as Redis, MySQL (or similar database systems).
• 5+ years of experience in developing highly available back-end systems and servers for large-scale MMO games, high-traffic web systems or applications.
• Experience with Python and its ecosystem (libraries, frameworks, etc.), familiarity with web frameworks such as Flask, Tornado, FastAPI, or another similar web framework and Python threading, as well as the principles of async programming.
• Experience with stateful and stateless game server architectures and automated testing.
• Ability to troubleshoot and debug complex issues across the servers, providing long-term solutions, whilst liaising with our QA team to enhance stability and performance.
• Ability to write efficient low-latency, low-IO code.

Skills it would be great to have

• Familiarity with messaging systems such as RabbitMQ, AWS SQS, Redis Streams.
• Experience working with AWS services like EC2, ECR, RDS, S3, and IAM.
• Knowledge of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and experience with Terraform for managing infrastructure deployment.
• Understanding of network infrastructure and cloud networking concepts, such as VPC, Subnet, Security Groups, and Load Balancing.
• Experience with traffic analysis via Charles proxy, browser developer tools, Datadog, logs.
• Understanding Kibana / Datadog log querying and dashboards.
• Have experience in version control, especially multi-track development and familiarity with deployments methodologies and CI/CD pipelines.
• Support and improve the workflows and pipelines that enable efficient content creation, working closely with other teams to ensure smooth integration.