Principal Engineer

Punt is a Vancouver-based, founder-led technology company behind two of the largest social casinos in North America. We’re evolving into a prediction-led super app—integrating prediction markets, social gaming, and new product surfaces into a single, cohesive experience. Our backend already operates at scale, processing high-volume, real-money transactions. We’re building toward a new category: the most advanced and engaging social gaming platform in the world.

Role Overview

We are seeking a Principal Engineer to provide technical leadership across Punt’s core product and platform architecture, spanning backend systems, frontend experiences, infrastructure, DevOps, reliability, security, and engineering standards.

This is a senior individual contributor role for someone who can operate at both strategic and hands‑on levels. You will help shape the technical direction of a fast‑growing platform, solve the hardest cross‑system problems, mentor senior engineers, and raise the quality bar for how software is designed, shipped, operated, and evolved.

The ideal candidate has deep backend systems experience, credible frontend architecture judgment, and strong DevOps/SRE instincts. You should be comfortable moving across API design, Laravel/PHP services, relational databases, distributed workflows, React/Next.js product surfaces, CI/CD, observability, incident response, and cloud infrastructure. You do not need to be the deepest expert in every layer, but you must be capable of making sound architectural decisions across the full stack.

This role is for someone who wants broad technical influence without moving into people management, and who is comfortable being accountable for architecture quality, production outcomes, engineering standards, and long‑term platform scalability.

Responsibilities

• Provide principal‑level technical leadership across backend systems, frontend architecture, platform services, DevOps, reliability, performance, security, and production operations.
• Define and evolve architecture for high‑throughput, transactional, real‑time, and customer‑facing product systems.
• Lead technical design across multiple layers of the stack, including Laravel/PHP backend services, APIs, data stores, queues, caches, React/Next.js frontend applications, CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, and observability.
• Bring an AI‑forward engineering mindset, using modern AI‑assisted development, code review, debugging, test generation, documentation, automation, and operational workflows to increase engineering velocity and quality.
• Establish high engineering standards for API design, service boundaries, frontend architecture, component design, state management, data fetching, performance, accessibility, observability, testing, documentation, and production readiness.
• Guide pragmatic modernization of legacy systems, including decomposing monolithic components, improving frontend/backend boundaries, introducing well‑scoped services, and improving deployment independence where it creates real business or operational value.
• Improve reliability and operability through better monitoring, alerting, dashboards, runbooks, release safety, on‑call practices, incident response, post‑incident learning, and production‑readiness reviews.
• Identify and resolve deep system bottlenecks across application code, databases, queues, caches, frontend rendering paths, network calls, infrastructure, and deployment workflows.
• Partner with infrastructure and DevOps teams to strengthen cloud architecture, CI/CD, automated testing, deployment safety, secrets management, environment management, scalability, and cost efficiency.
• Lead technical planning and sequencing for platform investments, helping the organization balance product velocity, reliability, security, maintainability, and long‑term architectural health.
• Mentor senior, intermediate, and junior engineers through design reviews, code reviews, architecture discussions, incident reviews, debugging sessions, and hands‑on technical guidance.
• Act as a technical escalation point for complex production issues, architectural tradeoffs, performance regressions, frontend/backend integration issues, infrastructure risks, and high‑impact system changes.
• Collaborate closely with Product, Design, Infrastructure, Security, Data, and executive leadership to ensure technical decisions support product experience, business resilience, platform scalability, and engineering speed.

Required Qualifications & Experience

• 10–12+ years of software engineering experience, including significant ownership of complex production systems.
• Proven experience operating at Staff, Principal, Architect, or equivalent senior individual contributor level.
• Strong backend engineering depth, including production experience with Laravel/PHP or comparable backend stacks such as Node.js/TypeScript, Java/Kotlin, Go, Python, Ruby on Rails, or .NET.
• Ability to ramp quickly in a Laravel/PHP production environment while applying strong backend fundamentals across languages and frameworks.
• Deep experience designing, building, scaling, and operating high‑traffic, high‑concurrency, transactional, or business‑critical systems.
• Strong understanding of relational databases such as PostgreSQL/MySQL, including data modeling, indexing, query optimization, transaction boundaries, locking behavior, consistency tradeoffs, and schema evolution.
• Experience with NoSQL, caching, search, messaging, or specialized data systems such as Redis, DynamoDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, or similar technologies.
• Strong architecture judgment across APIs, service boundaries, distributed systems, asynchronous processing, event‑driven design, fault tolerance, scalability, security, and operational tradeoffs.
• Strong DevOps/SRE experience, including AWS or equivalent cloud platforms, CI/CD, infrastructure‑as‑code concepts, observability, alerting, deployment safety, incident response, production debugging, and post‑incident improvement.
• Experience improving release safety through automated testing, deployment monitoring, rollback strategies, feature flags, environment controls, or progressive delivery practices.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical direction across teams without relying on formal authority.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to write clear technical design documents, explain tradeoffs, influence senior stakeholders, and align teams around pragmatic technical decisions.
• Experience mentoring engineers and raising engineering standards across teams.

Preferred Skills & Nice‑to‑Haves

• Experience leading architecture evolution in a fast‑growing company, including modernization of legacy systems, monolith‑to‑service transitions, frontend platform modernization, or major infrastructure improvements.
• Experience in gaming, social casino, fintech, payments, cryptocurrency, blockchain, prediction markets, or other high‑volume transactional platforms.
• Experience building or operating high‑availability, low‑latency, real‑time, or event‑driven systems.
• Hands‑on experience with containers and orchestration platforms such as Docker, ECS, Kubernetes, or similar.
• Experience with infrastructure‑as‑code tools such as Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, or CDK.
• Experience with frontend platform concerns such as design systems, shared component libraries, SSR/ISR, CDN behavior, Core Web Vitals, experimentation frameworks, analytics instrumentation, and client‑side observability.
• Strong familiarity with DevSecOps, secure coding practices, threat modeling, secrets management, authentication, authorization, fraud‑sensitive workflows, payment‑like flows, and production security controls.
• Experience defining engineering standards, architecture review processes, technical design templates, incident review practices, production readiness checklists, or operational excellence rituals.
• Experience improving engineering velocity through AI‑assisted engineering, automation, internal tooling, CI/CD improvements, test strategy, platform enablement, or developer experience investments.
• Strong analytical skills, including mathematical, statistical, or data‑informed problem solving.
• Experience partnering with executive leadership on technical strategy, platform investment, organizational scaling, and engineering operating models.

Education & Location

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• Must be able to work 100% onsite in Vancouver, BC .