Principal Backend Engineer - Casino

Hard Rock Digital is a team focused on becoming the best online sportsbook, casino, and social gaming company in the world. We’re building a team that resonates passion for learning, operating and building new products and technologies for millions of consumers. We care about each customer's interaction, experience, behaviour, 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 — ready to join us?

We are looking for a Principal Backend Engineer to join our rapidly growing Casino Technology Team, responsible for continuous growth and support of our Casino and Sportsbook apps. This Engineer will set technical direction across multiple teams and have significant ownership over the shape of our backend architecture. It is an exciting and rewarding opportunity.

As a principal-level backend engineer, you will:

• Set the technical direction and architecture for complex, cross-team systems

• Contribute to the design and implementation of complex features

• Work with other Principal Engineers and Architects across the entire Technical Team, and act as a mentor to Staff and Senior Engineers

• Be a trusted technical advisor for various stakeholders such as Engineering Managers, Technical VPs and Product Managers, influencing roadmap and architectural decisions

• Be technically talented, able to contribute quality code, and be passionate about the technology - including how AI-assisted tools are changing the way we design, build, and ship software

• Perform Code Reviews and coach Developers, Senior Engineers and Staff Engineers on why certain technical approaches need to be taken

• Be responsible for the quality, scope, and timeliness of all your deliverables

• Champion the adoption of AI-assisted development practices and tools across the team, helping raise the bar on engineering velocity and code quality

Because we operate with a startup mindset, we will be reliant on your technical skill, but also your passion and ownership over all aspects of your work, including how effectively you leverage modern tools - AI included - to multiply your impact and that of the teams around you.

We are looking for an engineer who is willing to tackle problems with innovative ideas and quality technical implementations. We believe the perfect candidate isn’t interested in just what we’re building right now, but wants to understand where we’re going. Principal Engineers need to define and design, and help teams build, systems that can process huge numbers of transactions and user interactions in a scalable manner while focusing on giving our customers the best experience possible.

The ideal candidate will have:

• Min of 10+ years work experience

• Hands-on experience using AI-assisted development tools (e.g. GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor) in your day-to-day workflow, and a genuine enthusiasm for how AI is changing software engineering

• Strong communication skills in English (both written and verbal)

• Experience working for a company with large volumes of traffic, where every technical decision needs to be able to carry the load of our customer base

• A deep understanding of AWS Cloud technologies and how to create scalable multi-region applications

• Experience with the following technologies:

  • Java and Spring / SpringBoot

  • RDBMS (ex, Postgresql, CockroachDB)

o   Streaming technologies (Amazon Kinesis, Kafka)

o   Message Queues (SQS, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ)

• Experience working within an agile development

• Experience with containerization (Docker, Kubernetes, etc)

• Experience with Micro-Service and Service oriented architectures

• Nice to have experience in the Casino industry or an equivalent regulated industry such as Banking, or experience championing the adoption of AI-assisted engineering practices (e.g. AI code generation, AI-assisted code review, agentic coding tools) within an engineering organization