Principal Software Engineer Backend & Agentic Execution Platform

Free Wheel, a Comcast company, provides comprehensive ad platforms for publishers, advertisers, and media buyers. Powered by premium video content, robust data, and advanced technology, we’re making it easier for buyers and sellers to transact across all screens, data types, and sales channels. As a global company, we have offices in nine countries and can insert advertisements around the world.

Free Wheel’s Programmatic Demand team is looking for a Principal Engineer to help define and build the next evolution of our DSP-as-a-service platform that powers Free Wheel DSP, Free Wheel Buyer Cloud, and products like Universal Ads. Over the next 3–5 years, backend and platform engineering in ad tech will be reshaped by:
Agentic software that can reason over business context, execute workflows, and safely interact with production systems. Model Context Protocol (MCP) and tool-based architectures that standardize how services expose capabilities to agents. New expectations around observability, governance, safety, and cost controls for AI-driven systems. This role is for a hands‑on principal engineer who can set technical direction, deliver core systems, and establish the patterns we will reuse across Buyer Cloud and our broader Demand platform as we build and deploy our first MCP server.

• Collaborates with project stakeholders to identify product and technical requirements. Conducts analysis to determine integration needs.
• Designs and oversees new software and web applications, supports applications under development and customizes current applications; develops software update processes for existing applications; assists and oversees roll‑out of software releases.
• Trains and mentors software development engineers on internally developed software applications and software development best practices.
• Oversees the researching, writing and editing of documentation and technical requirements, including software designs, evaluation plans, test results, technical manuals and formal recommendations and reports.
• Keeps current with technological developments within the industry. Monitors and evaluates competitive applications and products. Reviews literature, patents and current practices relevant to the solution of assigned projects.
• Provides technical leadership throughout the design process and provides guidance with regards to practices, procedures and techniques; serves as a guide and mentor for junior level Software Development Engineers.
• Assists in tracking; provides and evaluates performance metrics. Ensures team delivers software on time, to specification and within budget.
• Works with Quality Assurance team to determine if applications fit specification and technical requirements. Tests and evaluates systems, subsystems and components.
• Leads project planning, resourcing, requirement analyzing and defining, detailed designing and deployment of feature or system.
• Presents and defends architectural, design and technical choices to internal and external audiences.
• Consistent exercise of independent judgment and discretion in matters of significance.
• Regular, consistent and punctual attendance. Must be able to work nights and weekends, variable schedule(s) and overtime as necessary.
• Other duties and responsibilities as assigned.

• Define the technical vision for Buyer Cloud’s next‑generation backend, including how we expose platform capabilities through APIs and MCP‑based tool surfaces.
• Lead architecture and design for large‑scale, distributed systems with a focus on low latency, high throughput, and operational simplicity.
• Establish durable platform patterns for: multi‑tenant isolation and policy enforcement; safe rollout strategies (feature flags, canaries, progressive delivery); backward compatibility and API versioning for internal and external consumers.

• Design and implement systems that allow AI agents to safely take actions (e.g., configuration changes, diagnostics, workflow execution) with clear authorization boundaries, auditing and traceability, rate limiting and cost controls, and guardrails to…