Principal Technical Lead

About the role

We’re looking for a Principal Technical Lead to step into a high-impact role of one or more of our key clients. You’ll take over from our CTO, who currently serves as the acting architect and technical lead, and inherit a mature, well-established platform that powers player loyalty, incentive systems, and real-time gaming experiences for millions of users.

Responsibilities

• Own technical direction and day-to-day leadership of a 9–11 person team including QA engineers, QC engineers, and mid-to-senior level developers.
• Run or participate in sprint ceremonies, manage delivery against monthly release targets, and ensure the team consistently meets commitments.
• Conduct thorough, exacting code reviews—your standard sets the bar for the entire team.
• Mentor and grow team members; build a culture of accountability, craftsmanship, and continuous improvement.
• Serve as the primary system architect: design scalable solutions, make technology decisions, and own the technical roadmap for the platform.
• Contribute directly to the codebase—this is a hands-on role. You write production code alongside your team.
• Onboard into the existing system quickly and identify immediate, meaningful improvements without disrupting stability.
• Balance architectural perfection with pragmatic delivery—know when something needs to be bulletproof and when it needs to ship.
• Own release management and quality gates. You are ultimately accountable for what goes to production.
• Meet critical timelines without sacrificing quality. Filter urgent from important and keep the team focused.
• Support the Product Manager’s business requirements and make them technically possible—find the path forward, always.
• Log time accurately and adhere to established processes. Model the discipline you expect from others.
• Leverage AI tools strategically to accelerate development while preserving the human judgment and thoughtwork that makes great software.
• Identify opportunities for performance, security, and stability improvements across the platform.
• May guide additional agency work across Caxy’s portfolio as capacity and expertise allow.

Requirements

• 8+ years in software engineering with progressive technical leadership responsibilities.
• 3+ years leading engineering teams of 5+ people through regular release cycles.
• Gaming, sports betting, or trading platform experience —you’ve built or maintained systems where uptime is non-negotiable and real money is on the line.
• Deep understanding of player loyalty and incentive systems, including how they integrate with broader gaming platforms.
• Proven ability to onboard into complex, established codebases and deliver meaningful improvements within the first 30–60 days.
• Track record of meeting critical deadlines in high-stakes, high-visibility environments.
• Scala — 5+ years of production experience; strong functional programming fundamentals.
• React — 5+ years building complex, responsive front-end applications.
• PostgreSQL — 5+ years; advanced query optimization, schema design, and data modeling.
• Couchbase — 3+ years working with document-oriented NoSQL at scale.
• Kafka — 3+ years designing and maintaining event-driven architectures and streaming pipelines.
• GraphQL — 3+ years designing and consuming APIs; schema design and performance tuning.
• Kibana / ELK Stack — 3+ years for monitoring, logging, and observability.
• System Architecture — demonstrated ability to design scalable, secure, performant distributed systems.
• Release & Quality Management — hands-on experience managing CI/CD pipelines, staging environments, and production deployments.
• Flawless code review discipline—you catch what others miss and elevate the team’s standards through every review.
• Comfort with AI-augmented development: you know how to use AI to speed up the mechanical parts of development while applying human judgment where it counts.
• Strong ability to prioritize and filter requests—you protect your team’s focus while ensuring critical and urgent work gets done.
• Belief that easy things should be easy and big things are always possible. You don’t make simple things complicated, and you don’t shy away from hard problems.
• Process-oriented: you adhere to established workflows, log time effectively, and stay actively engaged across all workstreams.
• Executive communication skills: you can translate technical complexity for non-technical stakeholders and build trust with clients.

Qualifications

• A high-trust, high-autonomy environment. You’ll have real ownership over the technical direction of a flagship product.
• A mature, established platform—not a greenfield mess. You’re inheriting a system that works and making it better.
• Direct partnership with experienced Product, Account, and Operations leadership who respect engineering and understand the work.
• A team of capable mid-level and senior engineers, QA specialists, and QC engineers who are ready to be led well.

Skills

• Scala
• React
• PostgreSQL
• Couchbase
• Kafka
• GraphQL
• Kibana / ELK Stack
• System Architecture
• Release & Quality Management
• Code Review Discipline
• AI-Augmented Development
• Prioritization & Filtering Requests
• Executive Communication Skills

Benefits

• Competitive compensation ($150K–$200K) reflecting the seniority and impact of this role.
• An agency environment that values craftsmanship, open-source values, and continuous learning—we’ve been doing this for over 20 years.
• The opportunity to shape how Caxy works, not just what we build. Your expertise will influence our standards, practices, and culture.

Pay

$150,000 – $200,000 annually

Schedule

See posting for details