Staff Backend Engineer - Promos

Hard Rock Digital • United States, FL

3d

About The Position

Hard Rock Digital is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to own technical direction for backend capabilities in the Promos domain within its shared service and cloud ecosystem. The role addresses complex distributed systems problems and guides the evolution of APIs, events, data, and services while raising engineering standards across teams and remaining hands-on with implementation.

The engineer will work across Product, Mobile, Web, Data, QA, Platform, Security, Compliance, and Operations to turn ambiguous needs into durable strategies and guide critical initiatives from discovery through production. Staff-level impact includes creating clarity beyond a single team, developing other engineers, and taking accountability for organizational outcomes.

The position combines backend architecture and promotional platform development with execution, quality, production operations, responsible AI adoption, and organizational leadership. The engineer will shape service boundaries and technical strategy, build reliable promotion lifecycle capabilities, mentor engineers, and influence decisions across teams.

Requirements

• Typically 7+ years of software engineering experience, including substantial experience designing and operating distributed backend systems.
• A degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent demonstrated experience.
• Deep expertise with Java, Spring, and Spring Boot, with a record of establishing patterns and standards adopted by multiple teams.
• Strong AWS knowledge and experience building scalable, resilient applications across multiple regions and availability zones.
• Expertise with relational data systems such as PostgreSQL or CockroachDB, including schema design, transactions, migrations, indexing, performance, and consistency tradeoffs.
• Experience with streaming technologies such as Amazon Kinesis or Kafka and messaging systems such as SQS, RabbitMQ, or ActiveMQ.
• Experience designing microservice and service-oriented architectures and operating containerized workloads with Docker and Kubernetes.
• Strong judgment around high-volume systems, concurrency, idempotency, caching, asynchronous workflows, failure recovery, and backward-compatible API and event evolution.
• Strong engineering judgment across testing, observability, CI/CD, secure development, performance, privacy, and production operations for business-critical systems.
• Hands-on fluency with AI-assisted development and practical understanding of evaluation, hallucination risk, privacy, security, and responsible human review.
• A record of shaping technical and product strategy, delivering ambiguous multi-team initiatives, communicating clearly with senior stakeholders, and influencing outcomes without relying on formal authority.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in sportsbook, casino, online gaming, fintech, banking, or another regulated digital industry.
• Experience building promotion, loyalty, offer, reward, experimentation, or customer engagement platforms.
• Experience scaling engineering through shared libraries, developer platforms, service templates, internal tooling, or production AI practices.

Responsibilities

• Own backend technical direction for the assigned product domain, such as Promos, while aligning with shared platform, cloud, data, and service standards.
• Partner with Principal and Staff Engineers and teams responsible for shared capabilities, including identity, payments, compliance, messaging, and platform services.
• Guide architecture evolution and modernization, balancing product delivery, technical debt, scalability, and platform investment.
• Lead major restructuring work through iterative delivery, defining target states, sequencing work, surfacing dependencies and risks, and updating delivery dates as evidence changes.
• Build scalable and reliable promotion lifecycle capabilities, including configuration, eligibility, activation, state transitions, rewards, expiration, auditability, idempotency, and recovery.
• Collaborate with Product, Mobile, Web, Back Office, Data, and Operations to define service boundaries, API and event contracts, experimentation, success measures, and operational controls.
• Design resilient services for high traffic and transaction volume using suitable consistency, caching, asynchronous processing, rate controls, and graceful degradation.
• Remain hands-on with difficult technical problems, turn ambiguity into iterative delivery, delegate effectively, and correct work that is off course or not producing value.
• Model and raise standards for code review, testing, API design, security, observability, performance, CI/CD, controlled rollout, data migration, and production readiness.
• Lead diagnosis across services, APIs, databases, caches, queues, and event streams using correlated logs, traces, and metrics, and turn incidents into systemic improvements.
• Drive responsible adoption of AI-assisted development across discovery, implementation, testing, documentation, debugging, and review, and measure its impact.
• Identify valuable product and operational uses for AI, assess feasibility and model risk, and establish guardrails for evaluation, confidential data, human accountability, and production safety.
• Advise Product and Engineering teams, identify risks and opportunities early, use customer, operational, and market insight to make recommendations, and drive decisions to closure.
• Mentor Senior and Staff Engineers through architectural guidance, reviews, pairing, and reusable knowledge.
• Contribute technical perspective to senior hiring, capability planning, and career development.
• Resolve systemic risks, ownership gaps, and missing capabilities by bringing the right people together and leading change with clear commitments and learning without blame.

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.
• A diverse and inclusive work environment where employees are empowered to be authentic.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior