Principal Software Engineer

As a Principal Engineer on the Bleacher Report team, you will own the end-to-end technical direction of these fan-facing experiences and the platform behind them. This is a high-impact technical leadership role that bridges business needs and engineering execution across the full stack. Own end-to-end architecture across the stack — from client applications (iOS, Android/TV, Web) through the federated GraphQL API layer to the backend microservices, data stores and streaming pipelines that power scores, schedules, Gamecast, articles, clips and messaging. Drive the design and evolution of a federated GraphQL platform (Apollo Federation v2 / Apollo Gateway), defining subgraph boundaries, schema governance, entity ownership and versioning strategy across many teams. Set the technical direction for client-facing experiences and collaborate closely with mobile (Swift/iOS, Kotlin/Android & TV) and web engineers on API contracts, performance and data-fetching patterns. Ensure Tier-1 reliability: define SLAs/SLOs, resilience patterns (timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, back-pressure), observability and capacity planning for services that require high uptime during live events. Partner with Product, Content/Editorial, Data, Design and cross-functional engineering teams to translate business requirements into scalable, cohesive technical solutions. Review and approve technology choices and designs — assessing options for cost, performance, scalability, security and maintainability — and lead design and architecture reviews. Define and enforce engineering standards: coding standards, testing strategy, CI/CD, performance benchmarks and quality gates across services and clients. Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, raise the technical bar, and contribute to the team's technical roadmap and long-term platform strategy. Investigate and resolve complex, cross-cutting production issues — latency, data consistency, cache correctness, memory and stability — across the full stack. Drive innovation and adoption of emerging technologies — including AI-assisted development and agentic AI capabilities — and industry best practices, keeping B/R's stack and engineering practices modern and competitive. Communicate effectively with engineering leadership, stakeholders and business functions to ensure alignment and a cohesive approach. Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field. 15+ years of experience in software engineering, with a proven track record of architecting and delivering complex, large-scale distributed systems and platforms end to end. Deep, hands-on expertise in TypeScript/Node.js and modern backend frameworks (e.g., Express), building production services at scale. Strong expertise in GraphQL, ideally Apollo Server and Apollo Federation (subgraphs, gateway/router, schema design and governance), including patterns like DataLoader for efficient data fetching. Solid frontend/client architecture experience — able to define API contracts and data-fetching patterns for React web and/or native mobile clients (Swift/iOS, Kotlin/Android), and reason about client performance and UX at scale. Strong data layer expertise: relational databases (PostgreSQL, ideally with Prisma/ORMs) and NoSQL (MongoDB, DynamoDB), plus caching with Redis/ElastiCache (cache-aside, invalidation, stampede protection). Experience designing event-driven and streaming architectures with Apache Kafka (and/or RabbitMQ/SQS), including schema/contract management (e.g., Protobuf). 5+ years of cloud experience (AWS preferred), with Kubernetes/EKS, Docker, Helm, and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/Terragrunt). Strong grounding in resilience patterns, observability (Datadog, OpenTelemetry, structured logging) and production operations. Solid understanding of CI/CD (GitHub Actions), automated testing, code quality tooling, and secure engineering (JWT/auth, secrets management). Excellent problem-solving, debugging and performance-tuning skills. Strong communication and leadership skills; ability to influence and drive cross-team technical decisions. Experience with Elixir/OTP (Phoenix, GenStage) or other BEAM/actor-model, back-pressure-aware systems. Experience delivering real-time consumer products at massive scale — sports, social, messaging, live scores, or live streaming/clips. Experience with push notifications at scale (APNS/FCM) and fan engagement/messaging systems. Exposure to serverless (AWS Lambda) and multi-region, globally distributed architectures. Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development and agentic coding workflows (e.g., Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code) to accelerate delivery, and a track record of driving responsible adoption across engineering teams. Experience designing or integrating agentic AI / LLM-powered features into production systems — including patterns like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), tool/function calling, agent orchestration, evaluations and guardrails. Familiarity with the modern AI engineering ecosystem — LLM APIs, vector stores/embeddings, prompt and context engineering, and protocols such as MCP (Model Context Protocol) for tool integration. Contributions to open-source projects or engagement with the GraphQL/streaming communities. Naturally inquisitive, critical thinker, proactive problem-solver, and detail-oriented. Positive attitude and an open mind. Strong organizational skills with the ability to act independently and responsibly. Self-starter, comfortable initiating projects from design to execution with minimal supervision. Ability to manage and balance multiple (and sometimes competing) priorities in a fast-paced, complex business environment and can manage time effectively to consistently meet deadlines. Team player and relationship builder. Some Important Details.