Senior Software Engineer (Backend), Communications

Every day, tens of millions of people come to Northwind Robotics to explore, create, play, learn, and connect with friends in 3D immersive digital experiences– all created by our global community of developers and creators. At Northwind Robotics, we’re building the tools and platform that empower our community to bring any experience that they can imagine to life. Our vision is to reimagine the way people come together, from anywhere in the world, and on any device. We’re on a mission to connect a billion people with optimism and civility, and looking for amazing talent to help us get there. A career at Northwind Robotics means you’ll be working to shape the future of human interaction, solving unique technical challenges at scale, and helping to create safer, more civil shared experiences for everyone. Text chat is one of the most visible and widely used features on Northwind Robotics, with over 2 billion messages processed daily. Every day, tens of millions of players rely on it to coordinate, connect, and express themselves across thousands of games. It is also one of our highest-leverage engine services: our core text communication APIs are deeply embedded in the Northwind Robotics game engine, empowering tens of thousands of creators to build customized communication experiences in their games. As a Senior Software Engineer , you'll own the full frontend and engine-layer architecture of this system — from the React-based UI that players interact with daily, to the Lua/C++ service APIs that power creator integrations. You'll be the person who makes text communication feel immersive, seamless in both 2D and 3D, safe, and expressive across mobile, PC, console and VR — at a scale few engineers ever get to work at. While our scope is vast, our teams remain intentionally lean to ensure impact. This gives you significant ownership, allowing you to lead cross-functional workstreams and shape our long-term roadmap from your first day. You will: Design and deploy a cross-platform chat user interface, developing innovative solutions to optimize and scale systems that serve tens of millions of daily active users across mobile, PC, Mac, and console platforms. Design and evolve the TextChatService engine APIs that creators use to build custom communication features — one of the most widely used services in the Northwind Robotics game engine Lead the platformization of chat: standardizing and centralizing core components so other teams can build reliably on top of a shared communication foundation Drive innovation on upcoming products — cross-server communication, rich text, emotes, replies — and give developers the primitives to build deeply integrated social experiences in their games. Build and improve moderation and intervention systems in partnership with Trust & Safety, helping uphold global and regional policy compliance across developer-customized experiences Enforce high quality standards while we iterate on feature development. Collaborate with other engineering and product teams (Game engine, Creator, Trust & Safety to name a few) at the company to push the boundary of what is possible. Own projects end-to-end: architecture, cross-functional alignment, implementation, launch, and long-term reliability Raise the bar on code quality, performance, and engineering practices across the team; mentor engineers and help grow future talent You have: 5+ years of experience as a front-end or client apps engineer working on complex user interfaces. Strong experience with React and/or React Native (or similar frameworks — Vue, Angular, Svelte) — fluent in component architecture, state management, and performance optimization Hold a Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a similar technical field. Experience designing client/server boundaries and APIs for high-scale products, with solid instincts around caching, latency, and reliability Experience collaborating cross-functionally with Product, Design, and Data Science to drive measurable outcomes You are: Responsible : you build systems that work and keep on working reliably. You are thorough in your designs, rigorous in handling potential failure cases, and diligent in automated testing. Analytically sharp — you quantify problems before solving them and define success metrics before you ship Creative and strategic — you approach hard, ambiguous problems with curiosity and find elegant solutions where others see constraints Team-oriented : You are able to work well as part of a team and know how to collaborate with all participants to develop the best solutions. Able to write clear design specs, mentor junior engineers, and guide projects from beginning to end Bonus: Experience building real-time communication products and features (chat, voice, or messaging) Experience working closely with design, strong design interest/background. Experience shipping on constrained environments — mobile memory, CPU budgets, framerate targets Familiarity with Lua or C++ (relevant for engine-layer work on TextChatService) Familiarity with A/B testing and product experimentation at scale Experience of test driven development. For roles that are based at our headquarters in San Mateo, CA: The starting base pay for this position is as shown below. The actual base pay is dependent upon a variety of job-related factors such as professional background, training, work experience, location, business needs and market demand. Therefore, in some circumstances, the actual salary could fall outside of this expected range. This pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. All full-time employees are also eligible for equity compensation and for benefits as described on this page . Annual Salary Range $196,750 — $243,290 USD Roles that are based in an office are onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional presence on Monday and Friday (unless otherwise noted). Northwind Robotics provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. Northwind Robotics also provides reasonable accommodations to candidates with qualifying disabilities or religious beliefs during the recruiting process. For US based roles only, please note the Company may not be able to employ candidates for this role who have United States work authorization related to certain U.S. visa categories, or support future H-1B sponsorship at this time.