Principal Software Engineer

Job Description

Are you passionate about building large-scale backend systems that power experiences for millions of players worldwide? Do you thrive on solving complex engineering challenges, influencing technical direction across teams, and mentoring other engineers? We are looking for a Principal Backend Software Engineer to join our Backend Engineering team in Candy Crush Saga and help shape the future of our game as well as the engineering practices at King.

As a Principal Backend Software Engineer, you will work closely with engineers, operators, product managers, QA, analysts, and technical leaders across multiple teams and domains. You will lead the design and evolution of backend systems, drive end-to-end technical initiatives, and help teams make sound architectural and operational decisions. You will act as a technical leader within the organization, partnering with stakeholders across business units to balance scalability, reliability, performance, and business impact.

Lead the design and evolution of backend systems for in-game features that operate at massive scale, supporting millions of players and highly distributed live services. Drive architectural decisions, improve engineering standards, and build scalable backend systems that support highly available live game experiences.

• Strong professional experience with Java 17+ and modern backend development practices.
• Deep understanding of API design, distributed systems, and backend system architecture.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building scalable backend services and end-to-end system integrations.
• Experience working with gRPC and/or JSON-RPC based services.
• Solid understanding of dependency injection patterns and software design principles.
• Experience with Gradle, Docker and operating services on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• Strong understanding of system reliability, observability, incident management, and operational excellence.
• Ability to design, architect, test, document, and implement backend services and technical solutions.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills across technical and non-technical audiences.
• Passion for mentoring engineers, improving engineering culture, and raising quality standards.
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity, evaluating trade-offs, and making pragmatic technical decisions.

• Experience working in gaming, live services, or large-scale consumer platforms.
• Experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and modern developer tooling.
• Knowledge of event-driven architectures and asynchronous systems.
• Knowledge of performance optimization and scalability best practices.