**This is an opportunity to work for a remote-first company. Only applicants living in British Columbia will be considered for the role. Must be legally eligible to work in Canada.**
Our Values
Driven by PLAYER OBSESSION, we earn our players’ trust by understanding their needs and creating experiences that put them first.
OWNERSHIP means we take responsibility for our work and outcomes; we follow through, learn from mistakes, and never say “that’s not my job.”
With RESOURCEFULNESS, we do more with less, finding creative ways to overcome challenges and deliver impactful results.
Grounded in CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT, we are relentless in our pursuit of better; for ourselves, our games, and our players.
The Opportunity
We’re looking for a hands-on architect who designs systems AND builds them. You’ll spend roughly 60% of your time in the codebase—writing code, reviewing pull requests, prototyping solutions—and 40% setting architectural direction, mentoring senior engineers, and driving engineering standards. If your last few years have been mostly meetings, slide decks, and delegation, this isn’t the right fit. If you love going deep on hard problems and making an entire engineering org better through your craft, read on.
Location:
Remote within British Columbia, Canada
What This Role Actually Looks Like
You’ll be the most senior technical IC in the studio, reporting to the President. There is no large platform team beneath you—you’ll have engineering partners, but the expectation is that you personally do the deep technical work, not just point at it.
Primary Focus (~60% — Hands-On)
Design and build backend systems, services, and APIs that support our live games at scale. You write production code regularly.
Own system architecture decisions—data modeling, service boundaries, caching strategies, async processing—and implement the critical paths yourself.
Drive code quality through hands-on code review, pairing with senior engineers, and establishing patterns that the team adopts because they’re clearly better.
Improve application performance: profile bottlenecks, optimize queries, reduce latency. Prove it with data, not decks.
Lead the integration of LLMs and Generative AI into our game loops and internal tooling. Build the scaffolding for AI-driven features (e.g., dynamic content, automated moderation, or player support agents).
Build and improve observability—structured logging, metrics, traces, error monitoring—so the team can debug fast and ship with confidence.
Leverage AI tools (code assist, test generation, automated triage) to accelerate your own work and set the example for the team.
Secondary Focus (~40% — Technical Leadership)
Set and evolve engineering standards: CI/CD pipelines, branching strategy, quality gates, dependency management, and security controls. You’ll configure these, not just mandate them.
Mentor Tech Leads and senior engineers through design reviews, architecture discussions, and direct feedback on their work. Build a culture of clear ownership and shipping.
Act as the studio’s technical conscience on security and privacy—staying ahead of platform requirements, driving improvements pragmatically, and being the accountable point person.
Define SLOs, error budgets, and on-call expectations. Lead incident response when things break and drive post-incident reviews that result in durable fixes.
Partner with Product, Finance, and Legal to keep technical plans aligned with business goals. Translate engineering trade-offs into business language.
Own the SR&ED engineering process—eligibility gates in Jira, contemporaneous notes, artifact capture—partnering with Finance on claims.
Champion FinOps: monitor cloud spend, right-size infrastructure, and report on cost vs. performance.
Define the studio’s roadmap for AI adoption. Evaluate third-party AI vendors vs. self-hosted models, balancing cost, privacy, and performance.
What You Bring
Must-Haves
10+ years in software engineering, with at least 3 years as a staff/principal-level IC who stayed hands-on
Recent, demonstrable production coding—you can point to systems you personally designed AND built in the last 2 years
Deep experience with high-availability, high-throughput consumer-facing systems
Strong AWS background (IAM, VPC, ECS/Fargate, S3, KMS, and security tooling like GuardDuty, Security Hub, CloudTrail)
Infrastructure-as-code proficiency (Terraform or CDK) and CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions or equivalent)
Experience owning security and privacy posture in a platform-reviewed environment
SRE fundamentals: SLOs, incident management, load testing, graceful degradation
Data architecture across relational and non-relational systems
Observability stack experience (e.g., Graylog, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana, Datadog, Sentry)
Production experience using AI to accelerate development and operations
Clear communicator who can influence across product, engineering, legal, and finance without positional authority
Proven experience integrating AI/ML into production environments (e.g., working with OpenAI API, LangChain, or vector databases).
Nice-to-Haves
Unity, HTML5/JavaScript, and/or PHP game platform experience
MongoDB and/or MySQL in production at scale
Prior FinOps responsibility and vendor negotiations
Experience running SR&ED or similar R&D incentive programs
Background in gaming, live-service products, or other high-engagement consumer apps
A Note on Fit
This is
not
a DevOps/SRE role, a people-management role, or an “architect” role where you draw diagrams and hand them to someone else to build. Day-to-day infrastructure and tooling ownership is supported by an Operations team. You’re the person who makes the whole engineering org technically better by doing excellent work yourself and raising the bar for everyone around you. We’re a small, profitable indie studio—you won’t have a large team to delegate to, and that’s the point. Your leverage comes from your craft, your judgment, and your ability to multiply the people around you.
Salary
($140,000 - $200,000)
The listed pay range reflects the potential earnings for this role. Actual compensation will depend on experience, skills, and alignment with company needs, typically falling toward the midpoint for most candidates
Kano is a remote-first workplace with an in-person attendance requirement 2-6 times a year.
What we offer
Competitive wages determined by market research
Uncapped profit share program
Health, dental and vision benefits
3 weeks vacation to start
Paid holiday shutdown in December
12 paid Care Days per year
Yearly Continuous Improvement allowance
A results-driven company with a compassionate culture
Opportunity to work on game projects that are enjoyed by millions of players worldwide!
Ability to make a difference. Have an idea? Talk directly with leadership about it instead of running through layers of bureaucracy
About Kano
Since inception, Kano has released twelve gaming titles (seven of which are live serviced today), with over 35 million downloads and close to $100M in sales.
Bootstrapped in 2008, and achieving profitability in 2009, Kano continues to grow its team, game portfolio and player base as an independent gaming studio, with hit games like
Mob Wars
,
Idle Distiller
and
Monster Country
.
Canadian owned and full-remote, we believe in giving small teams of talented people challenging problems and getting out of their way. That’s why we look for the best and brightest to join our team; people who have talent, vision, and commitment.
Check out this
article
If you'd like to get some insight into our hiring process, our
employee manual
to understand how and why we do things the way we do, and this fun little
video
for an intro to the team!
2025 Great Place to Work Certified™
2024 Great Place to Work Certified™
2023 Great Place to Work Certified™
2022 Best Workplace™ for Mental Wellness
2022 Best Workplace™ in Canada - Less than 50 employees
2022 Best Workplace™ in British Columbia
2021 Best Workplace™ in British Columbia
2020 Best Workplaces™ in Canada – Less than 100 employees
2020 Best Workplaces™ for Inclusion
2020 Best Workplaces™ for Mental Wellness
2020 Best Workplaces™ in British Columbia
2019 Great Place to Work - British Columbia
2019 VIATEC Employer of the Year - Finalist
2018 VIATEC Company of the Year (11-49 Employees) - Winner
2018 VIATEC Employer of the Year - Finalist
2017 VIATEC Company of the Year (11-49 employees) - Finalist
2014 VIATEC Employer of the Year - Winner
*Kano is an equal opportunity employer and considers qualified applicants without regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, national origin, age, disability, medical condition, religion, marital status or veteran status, or any other basis protected by law*