Senior Backend Engineer

Salary: £65,000 - £75,000
Location: Remote, but within the UK
Please note: We are unable to sponsor international visas at this time.

About Nexus Mods
Established in 2001, Nexus Mods is the largest video game modding platform on the internet and a household name in the PC gaming ecosystem.

• 78M+ registered members
• 900K+ mods for 5,000+ games
• 25B+ mod downloads

We’re currently focused on product modernisation, driving growth and building infrastructure for the next 10 years of community-powered modding.

Our Role
We're looking for two experienced Senior Backend Engineers to join the engineering team behind Nexus Mods' core services. You'll design, build and scale the APIs and systems that power the Nexus Mods ecosystem, working on problems most companies never see: massive scale, complex compatibility and passionate user communities.

From discovery and experimentation through to delivery and scale, you'll be hands-on in shaping features that directly impact the modding ecosystem. Your focus may evolve over time, but areas you could work on include:

Keeping our community safe and supported

• Moderation and support tools, and user-facing features that resolve issues faster.
• Security features such as malware detection, authentication (2FA, login, account recovery), API protection, rate limiting and user data protection.
• Compliance and legal requirements, including child safety legislation, GDPR and cookie compliance.

Helping our platform and business grow

• Improving how users experience value and become paying supporters, through upsells, pricing localisation and onboarding.
• Building the foundations for community growth, such as creator partnerships and new audience acquisition.
• Admin tooling, dashboards, marketing integrations and data tools that teams across the company can rely on.

Core platform and ecosystem

• Helping millions of gamers discover, download and manage mods, and empowering creators to publish and manage their work with confidence.
• Building high-traffic APIs serving millions of requests per hour, for both web and desktop applications.
• Tackling complex challenges around dependencies, versioning and compatibility.
• Improving performance, scalability and reliability, and addressing technical debt so we're ready for the next decade of growth in gaming.

Responsibilities

• Deep experience with at least one backend language (Ruby, PHP, Java, Go, Node.js, etc.) and curiosity to learn others.
• Experience designing and building APIs (REST and/or GraphQL).
• Solid experience with relational databases (Postgres, MySQL) and familiarity with NoSQL stores (Redis, Elasticsearch).
• Experience with distributed systems, queues and event-driven architectures, plus production experience with performance optimisation and caching.
• Hands-on experience deploying services with CI/CD pipelines and containers (Docker/K8s).
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to balance speed, quality and pragmatism.

Bonus skills

• Familiarity with Ruby on Rails.
• Knowledge of authentication, identity management and payments.
• Experience with search systems (Elasticsearch, Meilisearch) or with trust and safety and compliance-driven engineering.
• Experience building tools for creators, modding communities or user-generated content platforms.
• Passion for games and mods, whether that's tweaking Skyrim load orders, building Minecraft servers or diving into Baldur's Gate 3 mod.

Requirements

• Own significant backend domains, designing, building and maintaining scalable, secure services and APIs that support tens of millions of users.
• Break down complex product requirements into clear technical plans and lead delivery of multi-sprint initiatives.
• Collaborate closely with other engineering teams to deliver end-to-end features.
• Contribute to product discovery by prototyping, validating feasibility and surfacing trade-offs early.
• Improve observability, reliability and operational standards, and drive best practice in performance, database design and security.
• Write clean, well-tested code, uphold high standards across CI/CD and documentation, and mentor other engineers.

Benefits

Benefits

• We work a 4-day week of 32 hours, with no reduction in pay.
• An allowance of £25 each month to spend on video games.
• Employee Assistance Programme.
• Private BUPA healthcare for you and your family.
• A very flexible training budget.
• Regular social events throughout the year. Participation is optional!

Diversity and Inclusion
We celebrate diversity and want you to bring your whole self to work.
Supporting an incredible community of tens of millions of users, we thrive on engaging as many views as possible to improve our platform. We see no reason why our culture should be any different.