Principal Backend Engineer - Core

Hard Rock Digital

19h•Hybrid

About The Position

Hard Rock Digital is focused on becoming the best online sportsbook, casino, and social gaming company in the world. We’re building a place that resonates passion for learning, operating and building new products and technologies for millions of consumers. We care about each customer's interaction, experience, behavior, and insight and strive to ensure we’re always acting authentically. Rooted in the kindred spirits of Hard Rock and the Seminole Tribe of Florida, the new Hard Rock Digital taps a brand known the world over as the leader in gaming, entertainment, and hospitality. We’re taking that foundation of success and bringing it to the digital space.

Requirements

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.
Experience with Java is a strong advantage; we’re less concerned about specific languages that we are about depth of backend systems thinking.
Solid understanding of Core account infrastructure and geolocation flows.
Strong written and verbal communication; 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).

Responsibilities

Be a technical point of contact for various stakeholders.
Be hands-on in both coding and architecture, leading from the front.
Partner closely with Engineering and Product leadership to shape roadmaps and make high-quality trade-offs that maximise business and customer impact.
Mobilise 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.
Lead and influence architectural direction for the most complex systems, ensuring cohesive and scalable designs.
Set and uphold 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 mentor, sponsor and develop senior engineers, multiplying your impact by enabling others to operate at a higher level.
Leading and influencing engineers in the team without direct authority – through code, design reviews and technical mentorship.
Spotting and resolving cross-team technical dependencies before they become blockers.
Champion the adoption of AI-assisted development practices and tools across the team, helping raise the bar on engineering velocity and code quality.