Principal Software Engineer

Victory Live•Atlanta, GA

9d•Remote

About The Position

The Principal Engineer is one of the most senior technical voices at Victory Live. You'll work across teams to set engineering direction, partner with technical leadership on systems that have to be right for the long haul, and serve as a thought partner to engineering leadership on where we as a team and platform are headed. You're an IC, but your scope is the whole org: your influence shows up in other people's code, decisions, and growth, not just your own commits.

Requirements

10+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of cross-team technical leadership at growth-stage or larger companies.
Demonstrated impact on architecture and engineering practice at the org level — not just on a single team.
Deep technical breadth: backend systems, API design, data, infrastructure, and at least one of web/mobile/platform.
Track record of introducing AI/ML or AI-assisted-development tooling into production engineering workflows and measurably improving developer productivity or code quality.
Excellent written communication as your design docs, RFCs, and postmortems should set the standard for the org.
Comfort operating with ambiguity and a bias toward structured execution over analysis paralysis.

Nice To Haves

Background in live events, sports, entertainment, marketplaces, or high-transaction consumer platforms.
Experience as a credible technical voice in M&A, partner integrations, or vendor selection.
Experience working with onshore + offshore distributed teams without sacrificing quality.

Responsibilities

Set engineering direction across teams. Guide decisions on systems, languages, frameworks, and patterns so they ladder up to company strategy, not just local optima.
Lead our largest, most complex initiatives such as multi-team initiatives and business critical strategic imperatives
Partner with Architects, the Head of Product Engineering, and the executive team on long-range platform strategy, build/buy/partner calls, and major investment tradeoffs.
Define and evolve best practices across teams, code, design, review, testing, observability, and AI-assisted engineering. Drive adoption and improvement, not solely documentation.
Be the org's AI engineering thought leader. Decide where agentic workflows, code generation, and AI tooling earn their keep; pilot to test and learn and remove things that do not work.
Solve the technical problems no one else can crack such as performance, scale, reliability, cross-system correctness and document how you did it so the team learns.
Develop engineers into stronger team members and contributors, preparing them and us for what comes next..
Hold the long-term line on scalability, security, and maintainability when shorter-term incentives push the other way.
Help define engineering standards enforced across the entire organization.