Senior Backend Engineer (Golang) - Draft Showdown

<h1>About Voodoo</h1><p style="min-height:1.5em">Voodoo is a consumer tech company founded in Paris in 2013, with one mission: entertain the world. Today we are 1,000 people, generating $1b+ in annual revenue, profitably. Our games and apps have passed 7 billion downloads and reach 200 million+ active users every month, making Voodoo the #3 mobile publisher worldwide in downloads, after Google and Meta. We were backed by Goldman Sachs, Tencent and GBL along the way.<br /><br />This position is Paris-based, with relocation support available.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><h1>Team</h1><p style="min-height:1.5em">For this position, you will be an integral part of a newly established internal studio, a dynamic and focused team dedicated to one of our most promising prototype in scale. This studio is specifically chartered to improve this high-potential game up to the successful and market-ready title it is meant to become.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">You will be part of the team building Draft Showdown, a turn-based multiplayer game, working alongside its client engineers and game designers as a full member of the game team. You will be part of a small group owning the backend that this game needs as its requirements become more specific and demanding.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">You’ll also be plugged into Voodoo's shared gaming backend platform - the same architecture and patterns that power titles like Mob Control and Block Jam 3D - building on it and contributing back, in close collaboration with the wider backend team. You get the focus and ownership of a dedicated game engineer with the leverage and support of a battle-tested platform behind you.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">This is a pivotal hire: Draft Showdown is moving towards competitive multiplayer, which means moving game logic from the client to the server. They are also implementing cheat detection safeguards to the game.<br />You will be central to that transition.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><h1>Role</h1><p style="min-height:1.5em">You will design and build the server-side foundation that takes Draft Showdown from a client-authoritative game to a competitive, server-validated one. The current game computes everything on the device - progression, economy, and match outcomes alike, which won't hold up for competitive PvP. Your job is to change that.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">Working closely with client developers and game designers from feature design through delivery, validation and iteration, you will:</p><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Build server-side validation for the metagame - currency, card upgrades, chest opens, and progression - staged by risk, replicating economy and reward logic on the server.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Move toward server authority for competitive features, where game state lives in one place and can be trusted.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Implement and improve matchmaking and cheat detection safeguards for a Deterministic lockstep PvP architecture</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Design APIs and player-state management that the Unity client integrates against, and help shape how client and server split responsibilities.</p></li></ul><p style="min-height:1.5em">The responsibilities are cross-functional, ranging from infrastructure, API design &amp; coding all the way to client-side integration (we are using Golang).</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">To succe