Entry-Level Full-Stack Engineer at Jackbox Games in Chicago, IL

Jackbox is looking for an Entry-Level Full-Stack Engineer to join our team!

About Jackbox Games

Jackbox is the mid-sized game studio behind the popular Jackbox Party Pack franchise. We’re known for releasing five new party games every fall; including Quiplash, Trivia Murder Party and very wholesome drawing games… your experience may vary. We’ve been featured on the Tonight Show, Polygon, Nintendo Direct, several chaotic streams, PAX Live events, a date between Ariana Grande and Pete Davidson (They still going strong?)...and the living rooms/finished basements/zoom calls of over 200 million users

Click the link to learn more about how our games work (spoiler: your phone is the controller), what we make and who we are at Jackbox Games.

The Role

We’re looking for an Engineer who thrives across the stack. Someone comfortable writing Go services and building a front-end to consume them . You’ll be taking on significant features across our engineering organization including our next-generation streaming platform that delivers interactive content to players in real time. You’ll help architect, build, and scale the systems that power this experience end-to-end.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and maintain backend services in Go that support both ongoing and future Jackbox Games needs
• Develop front-end features and interfaces that connect to live backend systems, ensuring smooth player-facing experiences
• Own and operate services in a live, always-on production environment including monitoring, incident response, and on-call rotations
• Model and optimize relational database schemas for performance, reliability, and scale
• Collaborate with game teams, designers, and product managers to translate creative ideas into solid technical solutions
• Participate in architecture discussions, code reviews, and continuous improvement of our engineering practices
• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and deployment tooling

What We’re Looking For

• Less than 2 years of professional software engineering experience across front-end and backend systems
• Strong proficiency in Go for backend/service development
• Hands-on experience designing and querying relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, or similar)
• Proven track record operating live services with high-availability requirements (24/7 uptime, SLAs, on-call)
• Experience building and consuming RESTful APIs and/or gRPC services
• Comfortable working with modern front-end frameworks (Vue, Typescript, NuxtJS)
• Understanding of cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and how the SDLC interacts with them
• Strong debugging, profiling, and observability skills (logging, metrics, tracing)
• Experience with real-time streaming protocols (WebRTC, HLS, RTMP) or low-latency media delivery
• Experience with message queues and event-driven architectures (Kafka, RabbitMQ)
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Pulumi)
• Contributions to open-source projects or a visible engineering presence (blog, talks, classroom projects, etc.)

We value kind, motivated, and creative people. Jackbox Games is a group effort and you must work collaboratively. Everyone here is committed to excellence and desires to work in a comfortable, friendly atmosphere.

Jackbox Games is committed to providing opportunities without regard to race, color, religion, creed, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, national origin, ancestry, age, veteran status, or disability. 

Okay, but what are the perks?

• Pay range: $93,492 - $112,276. Please note: individual compensation packages are based on factors unique to each candidate and position, including (but not limited to) skill set, experience, and qualifications.
• 401(k) with matching and medical, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance options.
• Flexible work schedule and environment. Currently, our employees are encouraged to work where they feel the safest and most productive. Our office in Lincoln Park in Chicago is open (and fully stocked with snacks) for folks who prefer to work in the office. We also offer remote work in the following states: California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin.
• Flexible PTO. Take time off when you need to recharge, take a trip, or just catch up on life.
• Annual stipends for therapy, growth, wellness, and home office equipment to encourage our employees’ lifelong learning pursuits and support mental and physical health.
• Creative work environment. We are lucky to work in a place that is full of talented and innovative folks. Most of the day, the place is pretty quiet (we’re a focused bunch), but this is punctuated with hilarious outbursts and general merriment.
• Free food either virtually or in the office. We stock our kitchen with snacks as well as offer doordash credits quite frequently.

Interested?

Great, we look forward to reading your application. Please include:

• Your resume.
• A cover letter. You don't need to be a professional writer for this job (we have those) but communication is important so we weigh cover letters heavily. We would love to hear a bit about why you are interested in working at Jackbox Games.

On the fence? If you're interested in the job but worried you aren't qualified, we encourage you to err on the side of applying. We'd hate to miss out on great candidates just because they're worried they don't check every box on the job description.