Principal Back-End Software Engineer

About the role

Light & Wonder is seeking a hands‑on Principal Back‑End Software Engineer to write production code, collaborate with architects and lead a small team of developers. The role blends individual contribution with technical leadership in a fast‑moving iGaming environment.

Key responsibilities

• Develop, review and own high‑quality production code using Java and Spring Boot, applying TDD and clean‑architecture principles.
• Partner with solution and enterprise architects to shape API design, event‑driven patterns and cloud‑native deployment strategies.
• Lead a team of 2‑8 engineers, run Agile ceremonies, mentor members and act as the primary technical escalation point.
• Build observability tooling, lead incident response and champion DevOps practices such as IaC, automated deployments and shift‑left testing.

Required profile

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with recent hands‑on coding.
• Proven ability to lead small engineering teams from design through production.
• Strong communication skills and experience in regulated industries such as iGaming or fintech.

Required skills

• Java, Spring Boot
• AWS (ECS/EKS, RDS, ElastiCache)
• PostgreSQL, MongoDB
• Event‑driven messaging (Kafka, SQS/SNS, RabbitMQ)
• Docker, Kubernetes
• CI/CD (Jenkins, GitHub Actions)
• Observability tools (Splunk, Grafana)
• API design (REST, OpenAPI/Swagger, OAuth 2.0, JWT)
• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Helm)