Hire Remote Network Programmers

Hire Network Programmers Who Make Multiplayer Feel Fair at Any Latency

Multiplayer is where games succeed or fail in the market. Lag, desyncs, rubber-banding, and cheating destroy player trust and reviews in ways that no post-launch patch can fully recover from. Network Programmers who understand rollback netcode, client-side prediction, server reconciliation, and the anti-cheat and matchmaking systems that make competitive games viable long-term are essential for any multiplayer title.

We match you with senior Network Programmers who’ve built the multiplayer infrastructure for shipped online games — engineers who understand UDP transport, game state synchronization, lag compensation, and the distributed systems challenges of running game servers at scale. Engineers who’ve debugged desyncs at 300ms latency and made them invisible to players.

Start in days, not months. Pay 50% less than equivalent US-based game networking talent.

What Our Network Programmers Build

Rollback Netcode & Client-Side Prediction

Deterministic lockstep and rollback netcode for fighting games and fast-paced competitive titles. Client-side prediction with server reconciliation for shooters and action games. The input delay, prediction window, and rollback buffer design that keeps competitive play fair at real-world internet latencies.

Game Server Architecture

Dedicated server architecture, authoritative server design, server-side game state management, and the tick rate and update frequency decisions that balance fairness, bandwidth, and server cost. Bare metal, cloud-hosted (AWS GameLift, Azure PlayFab), and self-hosted game server infrastructure.

Matchmaking & Session Management

Matchmaking service design — skill-based (ELO, TrueSkill), region-based, and mode-based matchmaking. Lobby systems, party management, invite flows, and the session lifecycle from queue to post-game. Latency measurement and region selection logic.

Bandwidth Optimization & State Compression

Delta compression for game state updates, interest management (only sending state changes relevant to each player), priority-based bandwidth allocation, and the quantization and prediction schemes that reduce per-tick bandwidth without sacrificing gameplay quality.

Anti-Cheat & Server Authority

Server-authoritative game logic that prevents client-side cheating, server-side validation of player actions, anomaly detection for aimbots and speed hacks, and integration with third-party anti-cheat solutions (Easy Anti-Cheat, BattlEye, custom server-side detection).

Game Networking Technology Stack

Transport: ENet, GameNetworkingSockets (Valve), KCP, custom UDP with RUDP Multiplayer Frameworks: Netcode for GameObjects, Mirror, Fish-Net, Photon Fusion/Pun, Nakama Game Servers: AWS GameLift, Azure PlayFab, Agones (Kubernetes), custom dedicated servers Languages: C++ (server and client networking), C# (Unity networking), Go/Rust (backend services) Matchmaking: custom ELO/TrueSkill services, PlayFab matchmaking, open-source alternatives Protocols: WebSocket, QUIC, HTTP/2, gRPC (backend services), custom binary protocols

Client Success Story: Competitive FPS — Rollback Netcode Cuts Lag Complaints 78%

A 5v5 competitive FPS was receiving consistent player complaints about “hit registration” and “lag compensation” despite reasonable server infrastructure. Analysis revealed the issue: a delay-based netcode model was applying 8 frames of input delay at 80ms latency — making the game feel unresponsive. Our Network Programmer replaced it with a client-side prediction + server reconciliation model: immediate local simulation of player movement and shooting, with server-authoritative hit validation using rewind buffers covering 200ms of player position history. Hit registration complaints dropped 78%. The game’s competitive review scores citing “network feel” improved from 5.1 to 8.3 out of 10. Player retention at the 30-day mark improved 24%.

Client Success Story: Battle Royale — Server Infrastructure Scaling for 100-Player Lobbies

A battle royale studio’s custom dedicated server couldn’t scale past 60 concurrent players per instance — the game state update loop was O(n²) in player count. Our Network Programmer redesigned the state synchronization architecture: spatial interest management using a grid-based region system (players only receive state for entities within configurable radius), priority-based update scheduling (high-priority: nearby players and projectiles; low-priority: distant terrain events), and delta compression reducing per-tick bandwidth 65%. Maximum players per instance increased from 60 to 128. Server hosting cost per match dropped 40% due to reduced bandwidth and optimized server tick scheduling. The 100-player lobby mode shipped on schedule.

Why Companies Choose Our Network Programmers

• Netcode depth: They understand rollback, prediction, and reconciliation at the implementation level — not just the conceptual level
• Latency empathy: They design for real-world internet conditions — 100ms+ latency, packet loss, jitter — not localhost testing
• Scale architecture: From game server infrastructure to backend matchmaking services, they understand the full online game stack
• 50% cost savings: Senior game networking expertise at a fraction of US market rates
• Fast start: Most engagements begin within 1–2 weeks

Engagement Models

• Individual Network Programmer — One senior networking engineer for netcode implementation, server architecture, or multiplayer feature development.
• Online Systems Pods (2–3 engineers) — Network programmer paired with a backend services engineer and DevOps. Common for full online game infrastructure builds.
• Multiplayer Teams — Multiple networking engineers for large-scale multiplayer titles with complex online service requirements.
• Contract-to-Hire — Evaluate networking code quality and architecture approach before committing long-term.

How To Vet Network Programmers

Our vetting identifies networking engineers who understand the hard problems of real-time game networking — not just socket programming.

1. Networking fundamentals — UDP vs. TCP for games, reliable ordered delivery over UDP, the CAP theorem applied to game state, and why authoritative server architecture matters for anti-cheat. Over 90% of applicants do not pass this stage.
2. Netcode deep dive — Client-side prediction implementation, rollback algorithm design, determinism requirements, and the specific synchronization challenges of their claimed experience. We probe for actual implementation knowledge vs. conceptual familiarity.
3. Architecture design challenge — Design the networking architecture for a specific game type (e.g., competitive FPS, 100-player battle royale). Tick rate, bandwidth budget, server authority model, and anti-cheat approach.
4. Debugging scenario — Given a desynced multiplayer game that behaves differently on client and server, walk through the diagnostic approach. What tools? What do you check first? What’s the most common root cause?

What to Look for When Hiring Network Programmers

Strong game network programmers design for adversarial network conditions and adversarial players simultaneously.

What strong candidates demonstrate:

• They discuss latency compensation techniques — client-side prediction, server rewind — with specific implementation details
• They’ve debugged real desyncs in production — they have war stories about state divergence
• They design with bandwidth budget in mind — they know approximately how many bytes their state synchronization uses per tick
• They’ve thought about anti-cheat — they understand why server authority is the foundation of cheat prevention

Red flags to watch for:

• “We used TCP because it’s reliable” — no understanding of why UDP is required for real-time games
• Networking experience limited to REST API integration — no game state synchronization experience
• No understanding of tick rate and its relationship to game feel and bandwidth
• “Anti-cheat is a separate system” — no understanding of how server authority prevents cheating at the protocol level

Interview questions that reveal real depth:

• “Walk me through implementing client-side prediction for a character movement system. How does the server reconciliation work when the server corrects the client position?”
• “Two players on different clients disagree about where a third player was when they shot them. Walk me through how you’d implement lag compensation to resolve this correctly on the server.”
• “Design the matchmaking system for a competitive ranked game with skill-based matching, regional preference, and a 30-second queue time target. What’s the algorithm and what data does it use?”

Related Services

• Engine Programmers — Low-level engine systems engineers whose infrastructure networking systems build on.
• Gameplay Programmers — Game mechanics engineers who implement the gameplay systems that networking must synchronize.
• DevOps Engineers — Infrastructure engineers who manage the cloud infrastructure game servers run on.
• Backend Developers — Backend engineers for game services like matchmaking, leaderboards, and player data.

Want to Hire Remote Network Programmers?

We source, vet, and place senior Network Programmers who build the multiplayer infrastructure that competitive and cooperative games depend on — engineers who implement netcode that feels fair at real-world latencies and server architecture that scales to launch-day traffic.

Get matched with Network Programmers →

Ready to hire Network Programmers who make multiplayer work right? Contact us today and we’ll introduce you to senior game networking engineers within 48 hours.