Senior Backend Engineer, AI Platform
WHAT MAKES US EPIC?
At the core of Epic’s success are talented, passionate people. Epic prides itself on creating a collaborative, welcoming, and creative environment. Whether it’s building award-winning games or crafting engine technology that enables others to make visually stunning interactive experiences, we’re always innovating.
Being Epic means being a part of a team that continually strives to do right by our community and users. We’re constantly innovating to raise the bar of engine and game development.
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What We Do
Epic Games is the creator of Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Epic Games Store — a company that has shaped the way billions of people play, create, and connect. We build foundational technology that powers some of the largest interactive experiences on the planet, and we give those tools to creators and developers around the world through open ecosystems.
Our AI Platform team is building an enterprise-grade stack of agentic AI systems that automates engineering workflows, accelerates developer productivity, and enables new kinds of collaboration across Epic's teams. We're not deploying off-the-shelf tools — we're building production systems from the ground up, across six interconnected platforms:\
- Geppetto — multi-tenant platform for team AI agents that live and collaborate in Slack channels
- EMA (Epic Managed Agents) — compute and workspace infrastructure for headless agent harness runs at scale
- Hodor — MCP OAuth gateway, plugin runtime, and governance layer for AI tool orchestration (1,500+ MAU, 700K+ tool executions)
- Multipass — agent identity, credential vault, and authorization for non-human workloads
- Vektor — org-wide memory plane with knowledge graph, deductive reasoning, and hierarchical summarization
- Roost — cryptographically signed software distribution and the Claude Code plugin marketplace
This is foundational work with real production usage and real consequences. The stack is live, growing, and touching every corner of Epic's engineering organization.
What You'll Do
As a Senior Engineer on the AI Platform team, you'll be a primary contributor and technical owner across one or more of the platforms in our agent stack. You'll take complex, loosely-defined problems — a new plugin runtime, an agent compute provider, a memory ingestion pipeline — and drive them from design to production with limited oversight. You'll work closely with the team's principal engineer and technical lead to make sure your implementations are consistent with the broader architecture, and you'll be the person others turn to when the work gets technically hard.
This role is for an engineer who wants to go deep. The problems span distributed systems, security, LLM integration, and developer tooling — and the surface area is large enough that you'll have genuine ownership, not just ticket work.
In this role, you will
- Own the design and implementation of major features and subsystems across the AI Platform stack — from Hodor's plugin runtimes and credential manager to Geppetto's agent-service LLM dispatch and session lifecycle
- Build and harden EMA's worker layer: workspace materialization, harness lifecycle management, normalized event streaming, and mid-run input handling across compute backends
- Implement production-grade components for Vektor's memory pipeline — ingestion workers, knowledge graph writes, semantic search, and nightly consolidation jobs
- Contribute to Roost's publish and consume pipelines: TUF signing, artifact storage, marketplace generation, and plugin signature verification
- Implement credential manager components with rigor: AES-256-GCM encryption, AAD binding, scope isolation, and audit trail completeness
- Write services that operate correctly under failure: circuit breakers, rate limiters, DLQ handling, and idempotent replay patterns
- Contribute to Multipass as it moves from strategy to implementation — workload identity, token broker, policy plane — under the guidance of the principal engineer
- Participate in on-call and incident response for Hodor and other production systems, building operational intuition alongside engineering depth
- Write design documents for the features you own — clear enough for async review, precise enough to serve as the implementation spec
- Collaborate across the team on cross-cutting concerns: NATS JetStream event bus patterns, multi-tenant isolation, RBAC enforcement, and observability
- Review code from peers with the goal of raising quality and spreading knowledge, not just catching bugs
- Surface architectural concerns early and engage constructively with the principal engineer and team lead when your implementation work reveals design gaps
What we're looking for
- 7+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of owning and shipping complex backend systems
- Strong distributed systems fundamentals: service design, event-driven architecture, failure handling, and multi-tenant isolation
- Solid understanding of authentication and authorization — OAuth 2.0, OIDC, RBAC — and the ability to implement them correctly in production services
- Experience with security fundamentals in code: secrets handling, credential storage, least-privilege access patterns, and audit logging
- Production Go experience, or strong fluency in a comparable systems language with demonstrated ability to ramp quickly
- Ability to take a loosely-specified problem, write a design doc, get alignment, and execute — without requiring step-by-step direction
- Clear written communication: design docs and code reviews that are precise, readable, and actionable
Strongly Preferred Skills
- Hands-on experience building LLM-integrated systems: tool use, agent orchestration, MCP server or client development, or streaming LLM output pipelines
- Experience with plugin or extension runtime patterns — WASM sandboxing, gRPC sidecar, subprocess management, or capability-based security models
- Familiarity with knowledge graph or vector database systems and hybrid search (semantic + keyword + graph)
- Kubernetes experience: pod lifecycle, sidecar injection, workload identity, or multi-tenant namespace isolation
- Exposure to software signing or secure distribution: TUF, Sigstore, KMS-backed pipelines, or artifact integrity verification
Bonus Points For
- Experience in the games industry or with high-concurrency, low-latency consumer-facing backend platforms
- Familiarity with Anthropic Claude APIs, Claude Code, or the Model Context Protocol
- Background contributing to developer tooling or internal platforms used by large engineering organizations
This role is open to multiple locations across NA.
ABOUT US
Epic Games is a leading interactive entertainment company. For over 30 years we've been making award-winning games and engine technology that empowers others to make visually stunning games and 3D content that bring environments to life like never before. Epic's award-winning Unreal Engine technology not only provides game developers the ability to build high-fidelity, interactive experiences for PC, console, mobile, and VR, it is also a tool being embraced by content creators across a variety of industries such as media and entertainment, automotive, and architectural design. As we continue to build our Engine technology and develop remarkable games, we strive to build teams of world-class talent.
Like what you hear? Come be a part of something Epic!
Epic Games deeply values diverse teams and an inclusive work culture, and we are proud to be an Equal Opportunity employer. Learn more about our Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Policy here.
Note to Recruitment Agencies: Epic does not accept any unsolicited resumes or approaches from any unauthorized third party (including recruitment or placement agencies) (i.e., a third party with whom we do not have a negotiated and validly executed agreement). We will not pay any fees to any unauthorized third party. Further details on these matters can be found here.
Backend pay context
Based on 256 disclosed Backend salaries on RoleSuite, the role pays a median of $158K/year, with most offers between $87K and $196K (10th–90th percentile: $87K–$243K).
See the full Backend salary breakdown →