Principal Software Engineer

Roles & Responsibilities: We are looking for a hands-on Principal Fullstack Engineer to lead the architecture, design and delivery of Bleacher Report's fan-facing products and the services that power them — from the GraphQL platform and real-time data pipelines down to the native mobile and web clients. This is a high-impact technical leadership role that bridges business needs and engineering execution across the full stack.

Own end-to-end architecture across the stack — from client applications (iOS, Android/TV, Web) through the federated GraphQL API layer to the backend microservices, data stores and streaming pipelines that power scores, schedules, Gamecast, articles, clips and messaging.

Drive the design and evolution of a federated GraphQL platform (Apollo Federation v2 / Apollo Gateway), defining subgraph boundaries, schema governance, entity ownership and versioning strategy across many teams.

Architect low-latency, high-throughput, event-driven systems for real-time sports data (live scores, play-by-play, notifications) using Kafka, message queues and caching, designed for game-day traffic spikes.

Set the technical direction for client-facing experiences and collaborate closely with mobile (Swift/iOS, Kotlin/Android & TV) and web engineers on API contracts, performance and data-fetching patterns.

Ensure Tier-1 reliability: define SLAs/SLOs, resilience patterns (timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, back-pressure), observability and capacity planning for services that require high uptime during live events.

Partner with Product, Content/Editorial, Data, Design and cross-functional engineering teams to translate business requirements into scalable, cohesive technical solutions.

Review and approve technology choices and designs — assessing options for cost, performance, scalability, security and maintainability — and lead design and architecture reviews.

Define and enforce engineering standards: coding standards, testing strategy, CI/CD, performance benchmarks and quality gates across services and clients.

Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, raise the technical bar, and contribute to the team's technical roadmap and long-term platform strategy.

Investigate and resolve complex, cross-cutting production issues — latency, data consistency, cache correctness, memory and stability — across the full stack.

Drive innovation and adoption of emerging technologies — including AI-assisted development and agentic AI capabilities — and industry best practices, keeping B/R's stack and engineering practices modern and competitive.

Communicate effectively with engineering leadership, stakeholders and business functions to ensure alignment and a cohesive approach.

What to Bring:

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

15+ years of experience in software engineering, with a proven track record of architecting and delivering complex, large-scale distributed systems and platforms end to end.

Deep, hands-on expertise in TypeScript/Node.js and modern backend frameworks (e.g., Express), building production services at scale.

Strong expertise in GraphQL, ideally Apollo Server and Apollo Federation (subgraphs, gateway/router, schema design and governance), including patterns like DataLoader for efficient data fetching.

Solid frontend/client architecture experience — able to define API contracts and data-fetching patterns for React web and/or native mobile clients (Swift/iOS, Kotlin/Android), and reason about client performance and UX at scale.

Strong data layer expertise: relational databases (PostgreSQL, ideally with Prisma/ORMs) and NoSQL (MongoDB, DynamoDB), plus caching with Redis/ElastiCache (cache-aside, invalidation, stampede protection).

Experience designing event-driven and streaming architectures with Apache Kafka (and/or RabbitMQ/SQS), including schema/contract management (e.g., Protobuf).

Experience building and operating Tier-1 systems (high uptime, strict SLAs) with real-time/low-latency requirements and large, spiky traffic.

5+ years of cloud experience (AWS preferred), with Kubernetes/EKS, Docker, Helm, and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/Terragrunt).

Strong grounding in resilience patterns, observability (Datadog, OpenTelemetry, structured logging) and production operations.

Solid understanding of CI/CD (GitHub Actions), automated testing, code quality tooling, and secure engineering (JWT/auth, secrets management).

Excellent problem-solving, debugging and performance-tuning skills.

Strong communication and leadership skills; ability to influence and drive cross-team technical decisions.

Nice to Have:

Experience with Elixir/OTP (Phoenix, GenStage) or other BEAM/actor-model, back-pressure-aware systems.

Experience delivering real-time consumer products at massive scale — sports, social, messaging, live scores, or live streaming/clips.

Experience with push notifications at scale (APNS/FCM) and fan engagement/messaging systems.

Exposure to serverless (AWS Lambda) and multi-region, globally distributed architectures.

Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development and agentic coding workflows (e.g., Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code) to accelerate delivery, and a track record of driving responsible adoption across engineering teams.

Experience designing or integrating agentic AI / LLM-powered features into production systems — including patterns like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), tool/function calling, agent orchestration, evaluations and guardrails.

Familiarity with the modern AI engineering ecosystem — LLM APIs, vector stores/embeddings, prompt and context engineering, and protocols such as MCP (Model Context Protocol) for tool integration.

A demonstrated habit of continuously evaluating and adopting emerging technologies — piloting new tools, running proofs-of-concept, and setting the bar for how the team leverages AI to improve developer productivity and product experiences.

Contributions to open-source projects or engagement with the GraphQL/streaming communities.

Characteristics & Traits:

Naturally inquisitive, critical thinker, proactive problem-solver, and detail-oriented.

Positive attitude and an open mind.

Strong organizational skills with the ability to act independently and responsibly.

Self-starter, comfortable initiating projects from design to execution with minimal supervision.

Ability to manage and balance multiple (and sometimes competing) priorities in a fast-paced, complex business environment and can manage time effectively to consistently meet deadlines.

Team player and relationship builder.

What We Offer:

A Great Place to work

Equal opportunity employer

Fast track growth opportunities