Software Engineer

Job Title: Software Engineer

Location: Remote, UK
Reporting to: Lead Software Engineer

Salary: £40,000 - £50,000 per annum

Contract: Full time, Permanent 

Company Overview 

At Lockwood, our vision is to bring people together through Avakin Life, where players can play, share, and socialize in one of the world's largest and most populous metaverses. Avakin Life provides an immersive 3D life simulation experience for millions of users worldwide. 

With a focus on innovation and collaboration, Lockwood offers a flexible and creative environment that empowers our teams to push the boundaries of what’s possible. We provide competitive benefits, including an employee share scheme, making Lockwood an exciting destination for those passionate about shaping the future of digital experiences. This position is available as a fully remote role, though there may be occasional meetups for social interaction and strategic sessions. 

Role Summary 

We are looking for an individual eager to be part of our Live Ops Engineering team building and scaling the systems and internal tooling that powers Avakin Life, ensuring the platform continues to deliver an outstanding experience for millions of players. You will play a crucial role in ensuring the team collaborate and effectively build scalable, reliable, and secure internal systems that support our mission to create an unparalleled social gaming experience. 

Key Responsibilities 

• Collaborate with teams across Lockwood to identify necessary functionality and efficiency improvements and to determine the correct solution. 
• Work collaboratively within the cross-functional team to deliver maximum value in an agile environment. 
• Take on new technical skillsets as the role requires. 
• Manage risk through a dev-ops culture and thorough testing, maintaining high quality. 
• Analyse the system for issues and resolve as priority dictates. 
• Continuously improve the development and planning process. 
• Understand what is valuable to the company, and how work relates to that. 
• Take ownership of the system produced. 
• Contribute to a strong team sense of identity and spirit. 
• Foster a learning culture within the team. 
• Work within best practices for secure, compliant, and reliable systems. 

Requirements

Essential: 

• 5+ years experience in software engineering 
• Professional understanding of agile concepts and processes 
• Good knowledge of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) 
• Solid grasp of dev-ops concepts and processes 
• Effective time management and estimation skills 
• Excellent communication skills 
• Self-motivated in work and willing to learn new skills. 
• Ability to adapt to change with resilience. 
• Understanding of back-end development best practices 
• Strong knowledge of UX/UI best practices
• Strong expertise in frontend development primarily in React and WordPress, or similar technologies.
• Experience in backend development primarily in Python and Golang, or languages such as Java, Node.js, or C#
• Deep understanding of microservices architecture, event-driven systems, and distributed computing 

Desirable:

• Experience in the gaming industry or large-scale interactive systems. 
• Familiarity with messaging systems such as Kafka, RabbitMQ or similar 
• Proficiency with monitoring tools like Prometheus, Grafana, or ELK Stack 
• Experience with AI/ML integration in backend systems. 
• Proficiency in cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and containerization tools (Docker). 
• Working knowledge of SQL and NoSQL databases. 
• Experience with Terraform, or awareness of IAC with willingness to learn
• Strong background in designing scalable, high-performance systems. 

*Please note our initial CV screening may be completed with support from AI