About Coverstar

Coverstar is building the first safe, creative, AI-native social platform for Gen Alpha. We’ve built a COPPA-compliant community where kids can create, collaborate, and grow safely. We’re backed by top investors like a16z, moving fast, and hiring a mission-aligned Backend Engineer to help us power the next generation of personalized content and community.

What You’ll Do

As a Sr. Backend Engineer , you’ll maintain, optimize, and scale Coverstar’s backend systems to ensure they’re secure, reliable, and high-performing . You’ll lead efforts in infrastructure, monitoring, and incident response while partnering with backend, data, and AI teams. Your work keeps every feature, feed, and livestream running smoothly and safely for our community.

As an Sr. Backend Engineer, you’ll:

Backend & Cloud Expertise

• Hands-on backend development experience, with deep proficiency in AWS services (EC2, Lambda, S3, ECS, RDS, DynamoDB, SQS, and more)
• Strong command of Node.js and Python for production systems; ideally familiarity with C/C++ or Rust for performance-critical components
• Senior-level SQL skills with experience in both relational databases (PostgreSQL) and NoSQL solutions (DynamoDB, Redis), including performance optimization and scaling strategies
• Drive proactive capacity planning and long-term infrastructure improvements.
• Experience building CI/CD pipelines is a plus.

Real-Time Multiplayer & Game Backend

• Design and maintain real-time multiplayer infrastructure: matchmaking, lobby management, player session handling, and in-game state synchronization using solutions like Photon Engine (Photon Cloud/Fusion) or equivalent
• Implement server-authoritative game logic to enforce rules, prevent exploits, and ensure consistency across clients — e.g. economy systems, reward calculations.
• Optimize multiplayer performance for smooth movement, packet compression, reconnection and dropout handling, and tuning network tick rates to balance responsiveness against bandwidth and latency constraints.

Incident Response & Security

• Expand centralized monitoring: build on our Grafana/Prometheus setup by unifying logs, metrics, and system health data.
• Integrate advanced alerting: configure automated threshold- and anomaly-based alerts for rapid incident detection.
• Simulate attacks and conduct penetration testing to uncover and fix vulnerabilities.
• Rare incident response during EDT daytime hours, restore services quickly, and drive long-term preventive measures.
• Build out SRE AI agents that assist with monitoring and troubleshooting tasks.

You Might Be a Fit If You:

• You are an engineer who understand how things work under the hood, not just how to make them work.
• Have 5+ years of hands on backend backend development experience, preferably on aws cloud.
• AWS Solutions Architect Associate or similar certification preferred.
• Knowledge of observability practices, and security best practices .
• Comfortable collaborating with distributed teams and providing coverage across EDT time zone.

Our Stack

• Infrastructure: AWS (Lambda, EC2, ECS, S3, CloudFront, CloudWatch, Kinesis)
• Databases: Postgres (RDS), DynamoDB, Redshift
• Languages: Required: Python, Node.js, (ideally familiar with C++ or Rust)
• Security: Automated vulnerability scanning, penetration testing, real-time monitoring
• Clients: Native iOS & Android apps via secure backend APIs

Why Join Us?

• Build and scale the core infrastructure behind the next-gen social platform for Gen Alpha
• Solve high-impact reliability and security challenges at the intersection of scale and safety
• Work with a fast-moving team of backend engineers, AI specialists, and product builders