Front-end Lead – Joy Studios

The Opportunity / About Us

We are an agile, innovative game studio building a proprietary ecosystem of games and platform tools. Operating within a larger global organization, we already manage a suite of game titles that are processing tens of millions in real-money transactions. Headquartered in Hong Kong with a multi-cultural remote team, we tackle high-scale complexity by deploying isolated, cloud environments for each of our global partners. We are at the intersection of social gaming, next-generation Provably Fair gaming, and operational excellence.

Role Overview

We are looking for a Front-end Lead / Head of Client Engineering to architect the future of our client-side tech stack. Reporting directly to the CTO, you will have total ownership of our game engine implementation, internal production tools, and customer-facing platforms. This is a foundational role requiring a balance of high-level systems architecture, hands-on development, and strategic team growth.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Architecture: Architect and maintain the front-end for robust, high-performance, responsive games and tools using TypeScript and HTML5 Canvas/WebGL (PixiJS, Phaser, Three.js, etc.).
Team Building: Be involved in the hiring process for the client engineering team, from sourcing and interviewing to onboarding.
Leadership, Mentorship, Growth and Project Governance: Foster a culture of excellence. Conduct rigorous PR reviews, provide technical mentorship, and define career growth paths for your team. Establish engineering best practices, coding standards, and CI/CD pipelines to ensure we build "quickly but not sloppily."
AI-Augmented Workflow: Champion, build and maintain an AI-augmented development lifecycle. Experiment with and evangelize best practices of incorporating LLM / Agents to support quality and velocity.
Internal Tooling: Architect and oversee the build of internal tools, such as game editors, asset pipelines, and dashboards, to accelerate game production.
Customer Platforms: Architect and oversee the development of customer-facing portals, SDKs.
Code Excellence: Maintain a high bar for quality through PR reviews, automated testing, and technical documentation.
Performance Ownership: Be the champion for optimization, ensuring smooth game experiences across desktop and mobile devices.

Leadership & Collaboration

Leadership: Experience leading engineering teams, managing PR workflows, and coaching engineers to write clean, maintainable, and performant code. Mentor team members and help establish shared responsibility for quality and agility.
Product Mindset: Ability to think from the end-user / player perspective; focusing on user experience.
Contribute to plans for scalability and operational robustness of core platform components.
Work closely with cross-functional team members.
Strategic Thinking: Collaborate with leadership on prioritization and roadmap that delivers the best game content and platform tools for our partners.
Autonomy: Comfortable operating in a "dynamic startup" environment where you are expected to define your own roadmap and communicate / present to other team members / departments.

Skills and Qualifications

Your Experiences / Technical Mastery

8+ Years of Experience: Proven track record in consumer-facing software, with 2+ years in a leadership role (Gaming or High-Performance Web sectors preferred).
Technical Mastery: Expert-level TypeScript/JS and deep "under the hood" knowledge of the Canvas API and WebGL engines. Experience with HTML5 game engines (e.g., PixiJS, Phaser, Cocos, or Three.js) preferred.
Experience with modern LLM-augmented workflows.
Platform & UI Frameworks Proficiency: Experience in modern web frameworks (e.g., React, Vue, or Svelte) for building complex, data-heavy internal tools and customer-facing web interfaces.
Architecture: Deep understanding of API design (REST/JSON), state management, and modular software design.
Tooling: Proficiency with modern build tools (Webpack, Vite, etc.) and version control (Git).
Optimization: You should be a master of memory management, draw call reduction, smooth performance, mobile optimization and asset-light strategies.
Degree in sciences/CS/engineering preferred but not required. We look for experience and passion.

Bonus Points

Experience with Full-stack development (Node.js).
Experience with SQL/NoSQL databases for game state management.
Experience designing extensible systems for live-ops, metagame promotions, and highly configurable game logic.
Strong portfolio or GitHub demonstrating complex systems (games, engines, or sophisticated web applications).

Our Tech Stack

Client: TypeScript, Vue, Three.js, Canvas API.
Cloud/Infra: AWS (ECS, Lambda, Pulumi), GitHub Actions.
Data/Messaging: PostgreSQL, Redis, NATS.
Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch.

You Are…

Action-Oriented: Delivers results through effective cross-functional collaboration. Get stuff done.
Takes Ownership: Ability to work independently and take ownership of complex systems with minimal oversight while engaging the team proactively.
Strong Communication Skills: Proactive in cross-team communications. Communicates clearly. Communicates changes and impacts proactively. Document changes and technical impacts.
Decisive: Exercising high judgment on when to refactor vs. when to ship.

Why Join Us?

Influence: You are the primary architect of our client-side future. Your choice of tech and tools will define our success.
Growth: We are a high-growth startup backed by an industry giant with significant resources to power growth.
Culture: A creative, driven, and transparent environment where we value "getting stuff done" over red tape.
Stability: Competitive salary, and benefits.