Principal Software Engineer

The Position

You are a technical voice the Engineering organization trusts and follows. You are part of a community of FanDuel’s most senior Engineers, focused on the organization’s most complex and ambiguous problems: shaping our future architecture, setting technical expectations and guidance, and setting and maintaining the highest engineering standards.

You guide, influence and are accountable for the final technical call on choices that affect hundreds of engineers across multiple domains and verticals. You embody our principle Challenge and Commit and have proven experience in judging when to look for consensus and when the call is yours to make. You know how to communicate and connect successfully at scale, in person and asynchronously.

You regularly interact with executives up to the c-suite, distilling the essentials from a complex technical strategy and folding business strategy into our technical direction.

You own the technical strategy for the CPE engineering domain, with ownership & responsibility for technical architecture (current and target state), operational excellence and engineering standards.

CPE builds the systems fans touch first and trust most: payments and money movement, account and onboarding, geolocation, responsible gaming and player integrity, and the promotions, rewards and loyalty, campaign orchestration, personalization, and marketing messaging that shape every fan s day-to-day experience. That means designing for extreme peak load that spikes around live events, and for a heavily regulated environment where auditability and evidence matter as much as availability. You take a leadership role on the domain s most important work, balancing a long view against short-term demands and taking a pragmatic approach to architectural design. Your work always follows our principle – Everything Begins with the Customer.

You do not accept the status quo, and you strongly influence other domains and verticals, and the organization’s “North Star” technical strategy. You will spend some of your time working with the Principal Community and other senior Engineers to set the standard for how AI is used across the SDLC, including where we choose not to use it, and to shape our engineering practices, back-end and front-end architecture, FanDuel’s product suite, our tools, approaches and processes. You wear your FanDuel hat first and foremost; you do not restrict yourself to organizational boundaries – We are One team.

You mentor and support our Senior Staff Engineers, themselves highly experienced, and serve as a role model to our engineering community and a visible part of how the domain is run. You are Humble and Hungry.

What We’re Looking For

• Expert-level experience building and designing scalable, fault-tolerant and highly available systems, including systems under extreme peak load that spikes around live events
• Experience influencing technical direction across 200+ person Engineering organizations
• Expert-level understanding of engineering design patterns and architectural approaches.
• Deep, current, hands-on command of AI-assisted software development: agentic coding and spec-driven development workflows, the context and tooling that make them work, and review, testing and verification practices that hold up as code volume rises
• A proven track record taking an engineering organization past experimentation to a measured change in how software is built: setting the standards for where AI is and is not used, evidence of the effect on throughput, quality and security, and the judgment to tell real uplift from theatre. Able to do this in a regulated environment, where auditability and data boundaries constrain what AI is allowed to touch
• Experienced in making pragmatic tradeoffs between short-term needs and long-term needs
• Able to build trust and shared understanding with teams and engineers who do not report to you
• Deep experience in modern back-end languages, functional and object-oriented, including Java
• Demonstrated ability to raise operational excellence and best practice through influence and collaboration

What You ll Do

• Take ownership of CPE’s domain architecture, aligning the domain’s Senior Staff Engineers on a target technical architecture and strategy
• Take ownership of the domain’s operational excellence, taking a hands-on approach to the resolution of its most complex issues when needed. This includes supporting resolution and mitigation of production incidents, and the corrective actions that prevent them recurring.
• Write simple code, taking complex paradigms and implementing them in a way that Engineers at all levels can understand and contribute to. You set the pattern through prototypes