Remote Backend Game Developer Jobs in Chicago, IL

Wand makes gaming magical. Through game customization and guidance, we build tools that helps players have more fun in their favorite games.

Our platform works across thousands of PC games, ensuring that great games are accessible to everyone, regardless of time constraints, skill level, or accessibility needs. We want to build the future of game assistance, and we're hoping you'll join us.

The gaming industry is undergoing a massive transition. The market has never been bigger, but players are drowning in an ever-expanding sea of content — and abandoning games at record rates due to pacing, friction, or simply getting stuck. When they look for help, they’re forced into a broken paradigm: alt-tabbing out of their game to wade through ad-heavy media sites, spoiler-filled wikis, or 15-minute YouTube walkthroughs.

Wand is building the augmentation and intelligence layer to fix this. Our technology reads game state in real time and powers a unified ecosystem across desktop, web, and native in-game overlays. Over 40 million players have already found us, largely through word of mouth. Every one of those surfaces leans on a small backend team, and the surface area of what we ship is growing faster than the team behind it.

We’re hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to own meaningful parts of Wand’s backend and help us drive the work forward. You’ll partner closely with our Head of Engineering and the application teams who build on top of your work. There are two threads in the job: building and owning substantial parts of the backend, and helping run it — making the architectural calls the team will live with, and pushing cross-cutting initiatives forward.

This is a senior individual contributor role. You’re self-managing, opinionated, and willing to drop into TypeScript in the Electron app or have a view on a UX workflow when that’s what the work needs. You’ll measure your own success by what the team shipped
because the backend made it easy.

• Scope, design, ship, and stabilize the services the rest of the product depends on. Own the fix when something misbehaves at 2am.

• Make the architectural calls — data model evolution, caching boundaries, where to spend latency budget, when to refactor and when to rewrite.

• Work fluidly across the data layer. Relational stores at scale (MySQL, MariaDB) and document stores (Firestore) are both in the toolkit, and you know which to reach for and when.

• Treat infrastructure as code as part of the job. Terraform and Ansible aren’t someone else’s problem; a service isn’t shipped until it can be re-deployed without you in the room.

• Treat performance, observability, and operational health as part of “done.” Dashboards and alerts ship with the feature.
  

• Open TypeScript PRs in the Electron app when a feature is better wired end-to-end than handed off. You’re comfortable on both sides of the boundary.

• Have opinions on UX workflows and product surfaces, not just API shapes. The best backend engineers we’ve worked with care how the thing feels.

• Get into the Electron app, the overlay, or the web surface when that’s where the bug actually is.
  

• Take ownership of what we work on, what we cut, and what we sequence. The Head of Engineering will partner closely early on; the bar is that this person eventually drives the roadmap on their own.

• Push cross-cutting initiatives nobody else will — observability gaps, data model debt, perf regressions, API hygiene. The work that quietly compounds.

• Provide substantive code review, mentor where it lands naturally, and raise the level of design discussions when the design needs it, not just the implementation.

• Bring thoughtfulness and genuine passion for the work. Contribute to roadmap decisions with an eye on outcomes.
  

• 6+ years building production backend systems, ideally for a consumer product with real scale. You can talk about what you built, who used it, and what shipped because of it.

• Strong with PHP 8.2 (Laravel or Symfony), or comparable depth in another modern web stack with a credible plan to ramp on PHP fast. Not a hard requirement — we care more about the engineer than the language.

• Relational data modeling at scale (MySQL, MariaDB, or Postgres). You’ve made the call between a wide table and a join table and lived with the consequences.

• Comfortable across data stores. You’ve also reached for a document or NoSQL database (Firestore or similar) when the shape of the data called for it — and you know when not to.

• Infrastructure as code is a default. Terraform, Ansible, or comparable. You don’t ship a service without thinking about how it gets deployed and re-deployed.

• Comfortable working full stack. TypeScript in an Electron or web app isn’t a foreign country — you’ve shipped there before.

• Outcome-oriented and high ownership. You measure yourself by what the team shipped, not by what you personally wrote. Ambiguous problems read as interesting, not as blockers — you’ll pick something up and figure it out.

• Fluent with the AI tooling that’s reshaping how engineers work. Claude Code or equivalent, the coding-agent ecosystem, MCPs, the workflows people are actually using day-to-day. You stay current because you find it interesting, not because someone told you to.

• Opinions on UX workflows and product. You push back on product when the API shape they want will paint us into a corner; you push back on yourself when you’re optimizing the wrong thing.

• Strong written and verbal communication. You write a design doc that gets read all the way through.

• Self-managing. You can pick up an ambiguous initiative and drive it without daily check-ins.
  

• Experience inside an Electron app at depth — IPC, packaging, native modules, the weird stuff.

• MariaDB specifically. We run it, and the operational quirks aren’t always Postgres-shaped.

• GCP experience — IAM, networking, the usual suspects.

• Cloudflare ecosystem, including Durable Objects, Workers, KV, and edge caching.

• gRPC, Protocol Buffers, or FlatBuffers comfort.

• Redis or similar caching at scale, and clear instincts for what should and shouldn’t sit behind a cache.

• Datadog or comparable observability tooling.

• LLM and vector DB familiarity (OpenAI, Weaviate, similar). We lean on these for Game Guide and a few other surfaces.

• Cross-origin / cross-process communication (postMessage, RPC, websockets).

• Consumer SaaS background, especially anything that’s had to hold up under organic, word-of-mouth growth.

• PC gamer. You play the stuff our players play.
  

• Competitive compensation and equity package.

• Fully remote work arrangement.

• The chance to build core infrastructure for an audience of 40M+ players who will actually feel the difference.

• A team of people who genuinely love games, move incredibly fast, and care deeply about what they build.
  

Please submit your resume.

Join us in creating the ultimate PC gaming companion.

Wand is an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. We welcome applications from all qualified candidates regardless of background.