Senior Game Programmer Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

About The Role
At MrBeast, we build global digital experiences that bring together content, commerce, community, and interactive entertainment. We're launching mobile competitions at a scale no one has attempted - imagine a million players competing in a live elimination bracket where one winner takes the prize. Nothing about that works unless every player trusts the game is fair.

We're looking for a Senior Game Security & Integrity Engineer to own that trust. You'll protect our games, players, tournaments, prize economies, and supporting infrastructure from cheating, fraud, abuse, and exploitation. This is a hands-on builder role: secure game and tournament architecture, automated detection at massive scale, and rapid response when adversaries adapt.

You'll partner with gameplay, platform, mobile, data, fraud, and security teams to design protections across mobile clients, backend services, APIs, and real-time telemetry - and you'll help set the integrity foundation for prize competitions watched by hundreds of millions of people.

If you enjoy adversarial problems where the attacker has real money on the line, this role is for you.
What You'll Do
Tournament & Competition Integrity
Design the integrity architecture for large-scale synchronous competitions: server-authoritative scoring, verifiable game outcomes, and tamper-evident result pipelines.
Detect and prevent score injection, result forgery, replay attacks, and clock/latency manipulation in real-time brackets.
Build defenses against multi-accounting, collusion, account sharing, and Sybil attacks on qualification and elimination rounds.
Define fairness controls for prize-bearing events, including anomaly review workflows before payouts are released.
Mobile Game Security & Anti-Cheat
Design client-side and server-side controls to detect bots, automation, input replay, memory manipulation, code injection, and modified or repackaged app clients.
Implement and operate device attestation (Apple App Attest / DeviceCheck, Google Play Integrity), root/jailbreak detection, emulator detection, and device fingerprinting.
Evaluate and integrate commercial mobile app-hardening / RASP and anti-cheat capabilities where appropriate.
Server-Side Integrity
Partner with gameplay engineers to make server-authoritative validation the default for critical game logic, scoring, and transactions.
Review APIs, WebSocket services, and real-time protocols for tampering, replay, authorization, and abuse risks.
Develop reusable security controls for rate limiting, session integrity, and transaction validation.
Fraud & Abuse Prevention
Build systems to detect account takeover, payment and payout fraud, chargeback abuse, account farming, promotion abuse, and virtual-asset laundering.
Protect prize disbursement: eligibility verification, geo/age restrictions on prize competitions, and coordination with KYC and payments teams on winner payouts.
Collaborate with fraud, finance, legal, data, and player-support teams to investigate coordinated abuse and reduce losses.
Translate abuse patterns into durable product controls and detection logic.
Telemetry & Detection Engineering
Develop security services, automation, and internal tooling (Python and/or TypeScript).
Build telemetry pipelines, detection rules, dashboards, and behavioral analytics for cheating, botting, fraud, and coordinated abuse - designed for extreme spikes (a million concurrent players in a minutes-long event).
Improve alert fidelity and maintain measurable coverage across player, application, and infrastructure signals.
Security Assessment & Incident Response
Conduct threat modeling, penetration testing, secure code reviews, and security assessments of mobile clients, APIs, and backend services.
Research emerging cheat tooling, mobile-tampering techniques, and gray-market services targeting prize competitions.
Triage and lead technical response to active exploits, cheating campaigns, fraud, and DDoS during live events, including real-time decisions on disqualification and event integrity.
Create response playbooks and drive post-incident improvements with Engineering, Legal, Communications, and Player Support.
Required
6+ years in game security, application security, anti-cheat engineering, fraud prevention, or mobile security.
Strong software-development skills in Python or TypeScript, with experience building backend services, detection tools, or automation.
Deep understanding of API security, authentication/authorization, session management, and applied cryptography.
Hands-on experience with mobile platform security: iOS/Android app hardening, attestation, root/jailbreak detection, or reverse engineering of mobile apps.
Understanding of server-authoritative game design and common cheating and abuse techniques.
Working knowledge of at least one major cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and distributed, real-time architectures.
Strongly Preferred
Experience with mobile instrumentation and RE tooling (Frida, objection, Ghidra, jadx, Hopper) and mobile RASP/hardening products.
Experience securing tournaments, leaderboards, sweepstakes, skill-gaming, real-money gaming, or other prize-bearing competitions - including the regulatory dimensions (geo-eligibility, age gating, KYC).
Knowledge of payment fraud, chargebacks, virtual currencies, or marketplace abuse.
Experience with SIEM platforms, streaming telemetry pipelines, and large-scale behavioral analytics; applying statistics or ML to anomaly detection.
Experience assessing WebSocket/UDP real-time protocols under adversarial conditions.
Security research, bug bounty, CTF, conference, or open-source track record.
What Success Looks Like
Our first million-player events run without a credible integrity incident - and when someone tries, we catch them before prizes go out.
Critical gameplay, scoring, and economy logic is validated server-side by default.
Time-to-detect and time-to-contain for cheating and fraud campaigns measurably improve quarter over quarter.
Security telemetry gives event operators real-time, actionable visibility during live competitions.
Players - and regulators - trust that our competitions are fair.
Why This Role Is Different
You'll defend competitions with real prizes at a scale nobody has secured before, in front of one of the largest audiences on Earth.
You'll build systems, not just review findings - and see them tested by live adversaries within weeks.
You'll work directly with gameplay, platform, fraud, data, and incident-response teams, with executive visibility into your work.
You'll help establish the integrity foundation for interactive experiences at global scale.
Location: NY, Bay Area, Chicago, Greenville Department: Engineering / Security Reports To: Director of Security Compensation: $202,000 -$236,000 base + equity + benefits