Game Systems Engineer (Kotlin) · Elysium Interactive

We’re hiring a Game Systems Engineer to work on our Minecraft network — a Kotlin monorepo powering custom game mechanics and progression on a multi-server architecture. The work is deep server-side engineering: designing systems players touch every session, and the coordination machinery that keeps a distributed game world consistent underneath them.

What you’ll work on

The scope spans everything in the codebase, wherever the next problem is:

Gameplay features and progression systems built on top of vanilla content
The coordination and state-management machinery that keeps the game consistent across multiple servers
Core services: persistence, messaging, storage, and the plumbing between game servers and backing infrastructure
Tooling around the game: for operating it, game design, balancing, and iterating on content faster

Who we’re looking for

Solid grasp of data structures & algorithms
Strong Kotlin (or strong Java and the will to switch), comfortable with JVM internals: memory model, GC behavior, thread scheduling
Concurrency competence: async composition, thread confinement, reasoning about races
Fluency working with AI agents: directing them through research and development for real leverage, reviewing their output with a critical eye, and knowing when a problem deserves your own head

Nice-to-haves

Minecraft domain knowledge: mechanics, server software (Paper/Folia)
Minecraft internals: protocol knowledge and comfort working at the NMS layer
Relational databases and JVM data access: transaction semantics, connection pooling
Messaging and caching infrastructure for inter-service coordination
Distributed systems literacy: consistency under concurrent writers, idempotency, partial failure, what happens when a node dies mid-operation
Multi-node game architecture: sharding, session handoff, failure recovery
Performance work: profilers and flamegraphs, tick-time budgets, allocation discipline on hot paths
Ops fluency: containers, metrics, reading production from dashboards
Game design sensibility

Send a resume and, if you have one, something that shows how you think — a plugin, a write-up, a gnarly bug story, an open-source contribution.