Principal Founding Engineer, AI-Native Product Incubation

Role overview Own the technology behind new consumer experiences for sports fans, taking products from early prototypes through launch and growth. This is a hands-on, full-stack founding engineering role with a strong backend focus, spanning cloud services, real-time systems, and web and mobile clients. Small AI-assisted teams use rapid releases and user evidence to decide what to develop further.

Responsibilities - Set technical architecture and direction across backend services, cloud infrastructure, and web and native mobile clients. - Turn ideas into testable products quickly, then strengthen successful experiences for growth. - Build and operate distributed backend systems, including gRPC services, event streaming, and durable workflows for live experiences. - Develop reusable platform capabilities for features such as social interaction, predictions, and live content. - Design for traffic spikes, failures, reconnects, data growth, and recovery; define service and client data contracts with client leads. - Use coding agents with appropriate tooling, review practices, and safeguards, and own production operations, observability, incidents, releases, and service costs.

Requirements - At least 10 years of professional software engineering experience, including launching consumer products and operating them in production. - Deep backend and distributed systems expertise; Go, gRPC, and Protocol Buffers are preferred. - Experience with event-driven and real-time systems; streaming platforms and durable workflow engines are advantageous. - Production cloud experience, ideally with Google Cloud, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and observability tooling. - Strong data modelling skills and enough web and mobile fluency to design end-to-end features and review client implementations. - Ability to make independent technical decisions and release user-facing changes safely using staged rollouts and production monitoring. - Experience with AI coding agents, or a demonstrable interest in adopting them.

Nice to have - Experience with NATS JetStream or Kafka, Temporal, PostgreSQL, Firestore, Redis, Pulumi or Terraform, OpenTelemetry, SwiftUI, Kotlin with Jetpack Compose, or React. - Experience building real-time experiences around live sports.

Benefits and work setup - Remote role based in the United Kingdom. Benefits vary by location and may include healthcare, mental well-being support, retirement savings, paid time off, family leave, and complimentary games.