Entry Level Educational Game Developer Jobs in Chicago, IL

SteelSeries is the original esports brand at the intersection of gaming and culture, celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2026. Founded in 2001, SteelSeries was the pioneering supporter of esports and competitive gaming tournaments. Today, the brand continues to inspire and empower gamers worldwide as a global leader in gaming peripherals, including headsets, keyboards, mice, and more. Driven by industry‑defining innovation, SteelSeries is known for premium quality and performance that helps gamers push their boundaries and play like a star. Here at SteelSeries, you’ll join a global community of gaming enthusiasts united by a passion for delivering exceptional experiences for gamers everywhere.

ABOUT YOU: We are looking for people that believe in collective code ownership, prioritize writing tests for every story, and are open to mentoring and being mentored. Our GG cloud team is in its infancy, and we are searching for someone to get in at the ground floor and kick it into high gear. If you are eager to expand your skills, engage in collaborative discussions with other engineers, designers, and product managers, and contribute to the improvement of our products and code, then this opportunity may be a great fit for you.

As a Lead Software Engineer, you will be responsible for working closely with our hardware and software product teams to ensure our products are designed and engineered to deliver a best-in-class web experience for our gamers. An ideal candidate is a data‑minded full‑stack cloud engineer that can make a huge impact on our product development, has a track record of delivering scalable cloud architectures, with hands‑on experience developing high‑traffic websites and open APIs that serve as a foundational building blocks across a product portfolio, and has a serious passion for technology.

• 7+ years of experience in full-stack software engineering
• Experience building scalable cloud solutions including container orchestration, database design, and network infrastructure, and distributed systems design
• Experience designing and building web back ends and web user interfaces
• Demonstrated ability to build and operate reliable, high-availability cloud platforms with hands‑on experience in observability (logging, tracing, monitoring) and resilience engineering
• Proven experience leading a platform engineering team to deliver well documented and well tested cloud solutions.
• Proficiency leveraging AI‑assisted development tools (e.g. GitHub Copilot, Claude, ChatGPT) to accelerate delivery, improve code quality, and drive engineering efficiency
• A desire to mentor and elevate fellow engineers
• Eagerness to continuously learn and excel in the craft of software engineering
• Experience leading a team of software engineers to produce tested and well‑documented software

• Come up to speed with our tech stack. Our new web application is written in React and deployed in AWS using containers.
• Ship a new feature in our cloud platform

• Evaluate the architecture of our cloud platform, suggest potential areas for refactoring, and work with product management and engineering to plan any desired changes.
• Assist product in defining the quarterly roadmap of work for the cloud platform team
• Continue to innovate and add features to our web-based experiences for gamers.
• Play with and give feedback on unannounced hardware products coming out next year.

• Work very closely with our hardware and software product teams to align on the vision for our upcoming products.
• Help define hardware and web APIs to ensure our apps can seamlessly interact with our hardware and cloud services to provide an amazing user experience for our customers.
• Proactively refactor code to achieve a perpetually clean design that has adequate test coverage.
• Evaluate new programming languages, frameworks, and tools and propose when they should be integrated and/or migrated to.
• Work across software teams to educate others on best practices for code, test, and documentation quality.

Other benefits include:

• 10% time (slack day) policy.
• Spend 1 day every two weeks learning a new skill, spiking out a new feature, taking a training course, or putting together a Lunch & Learn presentation for your colleagues.
• Continuous education stipend.
• We are looking for engineers who continually want to learn and grow, and we will support them in their ongoing training.
• Early access to SteelSeries gear such as headsets, keyboards, mice, and controllers.
• Test out and provide feedback on tons of SteelSeries devices before they hit the street.
• Employee discount on all SteelSeries hardware.
• We’ll provide you with all the hardware you need, but the employee discount is nice for friends and family.

Gaming? Check. Esports? Check. Hardware? Check. Software? Check. We could go on and on. The point is we've been helping gamers get better since 2001. In fact, Esports pros have won more money using SteelSeries products than any other brand and we're just getting started. Esports and Gaming are multi-billion-dollar industries, and we're going to continue supporting them through innovative gear and software gamers need and love. We believe in being true to the gaming community, which means being true to ourselves. We create products that help the best of the best be better, and products that help the not‑so‑good feel not‑so‑bad. Most of us are gamers, but you don't have to be, we promise! Just don't be surprised if you become one within a few weeks of starting! Want to see what we're up to? Find us on social media, where we're highlighting our community, amazing partners, and products.