Principal Backend Engineer

Schedule: 4-day week, 32 hours a week

Salary: £80,000 - £90,000

Location: UK or Europe

Please note: We are unable to sponsor international visas at this time.

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

• 79M+ registered members
• 950K+ mods for 5,000+ games
• 26B+ mod downloads

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

We’re looking for Principal Backend Engineer to join our Backend Engineering team. You will act as the technical lead within a cross functional pod building Nexus Mods’ core services.

This is a hands-on role focused on shaping technical decisions, guiding the pod’s engineering work, supporting the team technically, and ensuring delivery is robust, scalable, and aligned with our technical direction.

This is a chance to work on challenges most companies never encounter:

• Massive scale serving millions of users and requests.
• Complex mod compatibility, dependencies, and versioning.
• A deeply engaged and passionate global modding community.

From discovery and experimentation to delivery and scale, you’ll play a key role in shaping systems that:

• Help millions of gamers discover, download, and manage mods effortlessly.
• Empower creators to publish and manage their work with confidence.
• Power high traffic APIs and distributed systems at scale.
• Support both web and desktop applications.
• Enable rapid experimentation and iteration on new features.
• Ensure the platform evolves to support the next decade of growth.

• Own technical direction within your pod (architecture, design, tooling, trade-offs).
• Build and scale backend services and APIs serving millions of users.
• Ensure systems are performant, reliable, and maintainable.
• Align pod decisions with wider platform architecture.
• Support and unblock engineers to help teammates work efficiently.
• Collaborate closely with Product, Design, and other disciplines.
• Drive engineering standards across code quality, testing, and delivery.
• Contribute to discovery, prototyping, and iterative delivery.
• Identify and tackle technical debt and scalability challenges.

• Extensive backend engineering experience, ideally with gaming or tech.
• Deep experience with at least one backend language (Ruby, PHP, Java, Go, Node.js, etc.)
• Strong system design and architecture skills.
• Experience building and scaling APIs (REST and/or GraphQL).
• Solid understanding of distributed systems and event driven architectures.
• Experience with relational databases (Postgres/MySQL) and NoSQL (Redis/ElasticSeach).
• Experience with CI/CD, Docker, and Kubernetes.
• Strong communication skills and ability to lead through influence.
• Comfortable balancing speed, quality, and pragmatism.

• Experience with authentication, payments, or search systems.
• Background in high scale platforms or UGC.
• Understanding of gaming ecosystems (e.g. multiplayer services, content distribution, or digital marketplaces).
• Experience building tools for creators, modding communities, or user-generated content platforms.
• Passion for gaming, modding, or creator ecosystems.

• 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!

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.