Engineering Manager (Player Care Technology)

We are looking for a product-minded, highly technical Engineering Manager / Technical Lead to establish and scale our dedicated Player Care engineering function.

Scorewarrior is a game developer and publisher based in Limassol, Cyprus. The company focuses on the 4X strategy genre, with an ambitious goal to grow its hit game, Total Battle, to become the No.1 strategy game in the world. Our team consists of 200+ passionate, talented, self-driven, and continually developing professionals who love making high-quality games.

Our product: We are currently working on Total Battle — an MMO 4X strategy game with a deep political system and lots of player interaction. Players take on the role of a commander and need to develop their city, forge alliances, fight against monsters, and conquer other players. We're constantly developing new game mechanics, and the project is continuing to grow.

At the heart of our Player Care department, our mission is to excite our players with exceptional customer care, ensuring they feel valued, supported, and protected throughout their journey with us.

In this role, you will report directly to the Head of Player Care with no engineering middle management above you, making you the final, independent architectural authority and strategic partner for our technology ecosystem. You will balance the tactical system-design expertise of an infrastructure architect with the execution, hiring, and people-management drive of a founding team builder. In practice this is a player-coach position: expect roughly half of your time hands-on — architecture, system design, code review, prototyping — and half hiring, running, and growing a deliberately small engineering pod.

What you'll do

• Strategic Audit & Technology Roadmap: Partner with the Head of Player Care to review and challenge the existing technological strategy, and build a technology roadmap based on the outcomes.

• De-risk and Scale the Engineering Pod: Inherit current development resources, eliminate any SPOF vulnerabilities, and execute a metrics-driven hiring plan to build out a lean, high-throughput automation and backend engineering team.

• Insulate Global Support Teams: Build the backend triage pipelines and AI-driven deflection mechanisms to automate issue resolution.

• Internalize Massive Data Streams: Lead the zero-to-one design and implementation of an internal, high-throughput chat moderation and inference pipeline — owning the build-vs-buy case against our current moderation vendor, and, if building, delivering self-hosted models that classify messages across multiple languages and violation categories at a unit cost that beats the vendor bill.

• Drive Operational Breakthroughs: Build systems to strangler-fig eliminate raw SQL investigation bottlenecks, automate fraud detection and sanctioning by systemically modernizing workflows, and introduce automated diagnostics driving agent efficiency.

• Technological Risk Management: Scan and mitigate regulatory risks related to technology used within Player Care; ensure all systems are compliant with industry standards and regulations at scale.

What you have

• Proven Technical Leadership: You have a rock-solid backend engineering background and have spent several years managing, hiring, and building engineering teams from a small base (1 to N).

• Stream Processing Fluency: Hands-on experience designing and operating high-throughput, event-driven architectures and message-queuing layers (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ, BullMQ, Redis streams, or equivalent asynchronous frameworks).

• Practical Execution: Demonstrated experience in building and maintaining large-scale, high-availability services.

• Solo Flight Technical Judgment: You possess deep system design capabilities and are entirely comfortable acting as the ultimate technical backstop without a CTO or engineering peer to validate your decisions — and you communicate and defend those decisions transparently and openly with the rest of the team.

• Pragmatic, Cost-Aware Execution: Strong "Build vs. Buy" decision-making skills. You prioritize shipping tangible business value and infrastructure optimization over writing "perfect" code for the sake of technical elegance.

• Full-Cycle People Management: Deep familiarity with human performance loops, including a proven track record of managing technical hiring pipelines, running code reviews, conducting performance reviews, and executing terminations or PIPs when necessary.

• Objective Safety Mindset: You view player safety and content moderation as a strict, data-driven operational requirement governed by platform metrics, studio policy, and regional compliance standards.

Nice-to-haves

• MMO / 4X Strategy Domain Knowledge: Background working within a mobile gaming studio operating large-scale live-ops, complex economy tracking, or high-velocity player chat communities.

• Production ML Delivery & Inference Economics: You've shipped or directly owned ML-backed production systems (text classification, moderation, or anti-fraud). You can hire and manage ML engineers who deliver working systems rather than research artifacts, and you reason in inference economics: request volume × unit cost, lightweight classifiers vs. heavyweight LLM calls. You don't need to be an ML researcher — you need to know what production ML costs to build, run, and keep accurate.

• Moderation / Anti-Fraud Platform Background: You've built or run high-volume text moderation or anti-fraud systems at a UGC-heavy product (social network, marketplace) or in banking/fintech.

• Vendor management: Direct experience onboarding/off-boarding and managing 3rd-party technology solutions.

• Direct Business Partnership: Prior experience reporting directly to a non-technical operational or business stakeholder without engineering managers acting as translators.

Where you'll work

We value face-to-face communication, and we strongly believe that genuine human interactions move us closer to our ambitious goal. This is part of our culture, and this is why this job offers no remote or hybrid work opportunities.

You will be working in Limassol, Cyprus. If you're not from around here, fear not! Our dedicated relocation team will provide comprehensive support helping you and your family move to Limassol.

What we offer

• The best team in the world!

• An excellent remuneration package, including a 13th salary.

• Fully-covered relocation to Limassol, Cyprus for you and your family.

• A modern and sunny office space close to the sea.

• Private health insurance for you and your family members.

• A monthly school allowance for your children at pre-school and school-age.

• Lunch compensation.

• Personal development opportunities paid for by the company: professional and language courses, books, etc.

• Bonuses for outstanding results, years worked, getting married, and the birth of a child.

• Friendly monthly office parties and epic, annual offsite company birthday and Christmas parties.