Team Lead

ABOUT US

Xsolla is a global commerce company with robust tools and services to help developers solve the inherent challenges of the video game industry. From indie to AAA, companies partner with Xsolla to help them fund, distribute, market, and monetize their games. Grounded in the belief in the future of video games, Xsolla is resolute in the mission to bring opportunities together, and continually make new resources available to creators. Headquartered and incorporated in Los Angeles, California, Xsolla operates as the merchant of record and has helped over 1,500+ game developers to reach more players and grow their businesses around the world. With more paths to profits and ways to win, developers have all the things needed to enjoy the game.

For more information, visit xsolla.com.

THE ROLE

We are hiring a Team Lead, Web3 to lead a cross-functional team of frontend, backend, smart contract and QA engineers in Xsolla ZK, Xsolla's Web3 ecosystem on a zkSync-based L2. Your team builds:

• smart wallets built on account abstraction;
• SDKs that game studios and partners use to bring players on-chain;
• infrastructure backend services for tokenizing in-game items and currencies;
• ecosystem dApps: a DEX, an NFT marketplace and an auction.

This is a management role. Most of your time goes to people and delivery: building the team, growing engineers, and making delivery predictable. The rest goes to technical leadership: architecture, reviews and hands-on code where it matters.

Responsibilities

WHAT YOU WILL OWN

• The team: hiring, onboarding, growth and performance of frontend, backend, smart contract and QA engineers
• Delivery: predictable commitments, a sustainable pace and the quality of what the team ships
• How the team works: processes, engineering standards and an AI-assisted workflow
• Relationships with Product, DevOps and other Xsolla product teams: priorities, dependencies and expectations
• The technical direction of the team's product area: on-chain / off-chain architecture and key technical decisions, justified in writing
• Security and reliability of what the team ships: signing flows, contracts that hold user assets, production operation and the team's on-call rotation

WHAT YOU WILL DO

People

• Set clear goals and expectations for each engineer
• Run regular 1:1s, performance reviews and career development conversations; give direct feedback and address underperformance
• Hire engineers across disciplines: define roles, run interviews and onboard new people
• Grow engineers through mentoring and build the team's next leaders
• Build a culture of technical excellence, collaboration and continuous learning

Delivery

• Work with Product to shape requirements, estimate and plan work
• Manage scope, workload, risks and dependencies so the team delivers on its commitments
• Report progress, risks and blockers to stakeholders
• Lead the team through production incidents and post-mortems
• Continuously improve development processes and team efficiency

Technical leadership

• Review architecture and critical code across backend, frontend and smart contracts, with a focus on edge cases specific to Xsolla products: smart wallets, tokenization of in-game items and currencies, marketplace and auction flows
• Lead key decisions on smart wallet integration (UserOperations, paymaster and gas sponsorship), session keys and the signing flow
• Identify systemic risks (key management, signature phishing, bundler and RPC dependencies) and make sure they are addressed before they become incidents
• Contribute hands-on to critical features when needed
• Set up AI tooling in the repositories (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor: rules, context, harness) and drive its adoption across the team

REQUIRED

Management experience

• 5+ years of engineering management experience
• Managing cross-functional teams that combine several disciplines (for example frontend, backend, smart contracts and QA)
• Teams you led shipped dApps to production and maintained them

People leadership

• Hiring and building teams: defining roles, running interviews, onboarding
• Performance management: setting goals, giving feedback, running performance reviews, handling underperformance
• Growing engineers: career plans, mentoring

Delivery and stakeholders

• Delivery planning: estimation, sprint planning, managing scope, risks and dependencies
• Working with Product and other teams on priorities and trade-offs; explaining technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders
• Leading a team through production incidents and post-mortems
• Balancing management with hands-on technical work

Technical depth

A strong technical background: hands-on engineering experience across the Web3 stack, deep enough to lead technical decisions and review work on each layer:

• Web3 libraries and wallets: viem and wagmi in production; how wallet signers work (EOAs, browser and embedded wallets, smart accounts, EIP-191, EIP-712, EIP-1193); smart wallets (UserOperations, paymasters, ERC-1271)
• Backend: Go and TypeScript (Node.js); processing on-chain events (idempotency, reorgs, retries); asynchronous messaging (Kafka, RabbitMQ or NATS); PostgreSQL and Redis; REST and gRPC API design
• Frontend: React and TypeScript; web security fundamentals (XSS, CSRF, CSP, safe handling of signatures and keys in the browser)
• Smart contracts: reading Solidity and the EVM (storage, gas, proxy upgrade patterns, access control); common vulnerability classes (reentrancy, front-running / MEV, oracle manipulation, signature replay)
• Operations: Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD; observability (we use Datadog; experience with Prometheus, Grafana, ELK / Graylog or OpenTelemetry also counts)

AI-assisted engineering

• Daily hands-on use of AI coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) for development and review, including configuring them for a repository

English

• Spoken English at B2 level or higher

Nice to Have

• ZK Stack and zk-rollups: EraVM vs EVM, system contracts (ContractDeployer, NonceHolder), L1↔L2 messaging, bridging and finality
• Smart contract development in Solidity with Foundry
• Deeper account abstraction: ERC-4337 EntryPoint versions and validation rules (ERC-7562, ERC-6492), modular accounts (ERC-7579 / ERC-6900), session keys and delegated permissions (ERC-7710 / ERC-7715), EIP-7702
• Hands-on experience with wallet and AA infrastructure technologies (Sequence, thirdweb, Privy, Dynamic, Turnkey, Pimlico, Alchemy, ZeroDev, Safe{Core}), with clear views on build versus buy
• Key management: HSM, MPC / threshold signing, social or guardian-based recovery
• DeFi (DEX, AMM) and NFT marketplaces (ERC-721, ERC-1155, auctions)
• go-ethereum and abigen
• Managing distributed or remote teams
• Gaming or fintech experience with high-load systems

HOW WE WORK

• Decisions in writing. Significant technical decisions are written up as an RFC or ADR that lays out the options and trade-offs. We discuss the document, not a blank whiteboard.
• AI is part of everyday engineering. We use AI coding tools for development and review, and we treat configuring them for a codebase as real engineering work.

HOW WE HIRE

• Intro call. Your background, your motivation and the role.
• Technical interview. Built on the Technical depth part of the Required section and the technical items in What you will own.
• People and delivery. Built on the Management experience, People leadership and Delivery and stakeholders parts of Required: real situations from your experience with hiring, performance, delivery and incidents.
• Bar raiser. An engineer from outside the hiring team checks that you raise the overall engineering bar.

BENEFITS

We are passionate about fostering a supportive environment for our team, so we prioritize the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of our employees and their families through a comprehensive Benefits Program. This includes medical, dental, and vision, PTO, and a personalized career roadmap for each employee. By investing in professional development through training and educational opportunities, we ensure that our team thrives both personally and professionally. Together, we're not just building a business; we're cultivating a community that values creativity, collaboration, and the transformative power of play.

EMPLOYMENT DETAILS

• Location: Remote
• Employment Type: Full-time
• Schedule: 10:00–19:00 (flexible)
• Contract: Employment agreement (entity or EOR arranged per candidate location)

EQUAL EMPLOYMENT STATEMENT

Xsolla is dedicated to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, language, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, political beliefs, disability, age, marital status, social background or other characteristics.

We are committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.

CONTACT

If you have questions regarding our hiring practices, please contact careers@xsolla.com. For more vacancies, visit xsolla.com/careers.