Hands-On Architect

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 technical problems, this is for you.

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

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*