Principal Backend Engineer - Core

Achieve Your Impact

A Principal Backend Engineer at Hard Rock Digital is responsible for:

• Technical point of contact for various stakeholders
• Hands-on in both coding and architecture, leading from the front
• Partnering closely with Engineering and Product leadership to shape roadmaps and make high-quality trade-offs that maximize business and customer impact
• Mobilising the team around high-impact problems, creating clarity, alignment and momentum, injecting urgency when needed, or slowing things down to ensure safety and long-term sustainability
• Leading and influencing architectural direction for the most complex systems, ensuring cohesive and scalable designs
• Setting and upholding a high bar for technical excellence across the team, driving improvements in quality, readability and scalability, and fostering a culture where engineers hold each other to that standard
• Proactively mentoring, sponsoring and developing senior engineers, multiplying your impact by enabling others to operate at a higher level
• Spotting and resolving cross-team technical dependencies before they become blockers
• Championing the adoption of AI-assisted development practices and tools across the team, helping raise the bar on engineering velocity and code quality

Qualifications

• Demonstrable experience operating at staff or principal level
• Deep backend engineering expertise with a track record of designing and building distributed systems at scale
• The kind of judgment that earns trust fast – engineers follow your technical lead because you’re right, not because of your title
• Strong understanding of Core account infrastructure and geolocation flows
• Solid written and verbal communication skills; you can make complex technical decisions legible to non-technical stakeholders
• Hands-on experience using AI-assisted development tools (e.g. GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor) in your day-to-day workflow, with a genuine enthusiasm for how AI is changing software engineering, and a track record of championing AI-assisted practices — in software development, system design, testing, operations, or troubleshooting — while understanding their limitations and trade-offs
• Degree in computer science, a related field, or equivalent work experience (10+ years)

Benefits

• Competitive pay and benefits
• Flexible vacation allowance
• Flexible work from home or office hours
• Startup culture backed by a secure, global brand
• Opportunity to build products enjoyed by millions as part of a passionate team