Team Lead Backend Engineer
Xsolla (USA), Inc., operating under the Xsolla brand, is a global video game commerce and payments company serving game developers, publishers, creators, and payment providers.
Maintainer signals as of 9/25/2026
Projects
About Xsolla (USA), Inc.
Xsolla provides merchant-of-record and payment-processing services plus direct-to-consumer commerce, web shops, publishing and distribution tools, cloud gaming, fraud prevention, player engagement, creator monetization, and developer tooling for the video game industry. Its solutions operate across 200+ geographies with 1,000+ payment methods and are actively supported through live products, documentation, customer support, and ongoing hiring.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
About the Role
You will lead the technical strategy and architecture for authentication, authorization, and session management at scale. You will design OAuth and OIDC flows, strengthen web-security controls, guide Ory and CockroachDB decisions, and lead a zero-downtime identity migration. You will review security-critical code, resolve systemic risks, contribute to critical security features, manage and mentor engineers, and coordinate roadmap delivery with dependent product teams.
Requirements
- 5+ years of commercial Go experience, or 7+ years in other backend languages with Go proficiency
- Expertise in OAuth 2.0, OIDC, and IAM systems
- Knowledge of authorization code with PKCE, client credentials, device flow, token introspection, and refresh strategies
- Understanding of JWT, token refresh flows, and session management
- Knowledge of password hashing and secure storage
- Knowledge of cookie security, CSRF, XSS, TLS, and secure session management
- Knowledge of MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Redis
- Experience with distributed-system trade-offs
- Experience designing highly available systems
- Understanding of security best practices and OWASP vulnerabilities
- Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and production deployments
- 2+ years of engineering-team leadership experience
- Experience delivering mission-critical infrastructure
- Ability to lead multi-quarter cross-team technical initiatives
- Experience with security-focused code review
- Written and verbal communication skills
- Ability to balance security requirements and delivery timelines
Responsibilities
- Own the technical strategy and architecture for authentication, authorization, and session management
- Design and evolve OAuth 2.0 and OIDC flows, token lifecycles, and security primitives
- Lead decisions on Ory, custom authentication methods, and Auth API orchestration
- Own cookie security, CSRF and XSS protection, token storage, TLS, and session management
- Drive CockroachDB strategy for geo-distributed data residency
- Review security-critical code and enforce best practices
- Drive zero-downtime migration from legacy Xsolla Login with bidirectional identity synchronization
- Identify and resolve systemic risks and performance bottlenecks
- Make system-design, security-architecture, and technology decisions
- Contribute hands-on to critical security features
- Lead and mentor up to eight backend engineers
- Conduct 1:1s, performance reviews, and career-development conversations
- Hire and onboard engineers with IAM and security expertise
- Manage workload and delivery commitments
- Own delivery predictability for the platform
- Collaborate with Product on IAM roadmap and priorities
- Coordinate with dependent product teams
- Report security posture, platform reliability, and team progress