Principal Engineer

**This is an opportunity to work for a remote-first company. Only applicants living in British Columbia will be considered for the role. Must be legally eligible to work in Canada.**

Driven by PLAYER OBSESSION, we earn our players’ trust by understanding their needs and creating experiences that put them first.

OWNERSHIP means we take responsibility for our work and outcomes; we follow through, learn from mistakes, and never say “that’s not my job.”

With RESOURCEFULNESS, we do more with less, finding creative ways to overcome challenges and deliver impactful results.

Grounded in CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT, we are relentless in our pursuit of better; for ourselves, our games, and our players.

At Kano, we build communities through gaming experiences that connect millions of players worldwide. We’re looking for a Principal Engineer (P4 Software Developer) to provide senior technical leadership across our product and backend systems. This role is focused on system design, application architecture, and engineering decision-making - helping teams build scalable, maintainable software while balancing quality, speed, and long-term sustainability.

You’ll work closely with product, design, and engineering teams to guide architectural direction, set engineering standards, and support teams as systems grow in complexity. While you should be comfortable reasoning about infrastructure, pipelines, and security, this role is not a DevOps or SRE position. Your primary focus is on how software systems are designed and built, with day-to-day infrastructure or tooling ownership supported by your Operations team.

Location: Remote within British Columbia, Canada

• Drive Technical Excellence: Define and drive a studio‑wide program for quality, performance, and continuous improvement. Establish performance budgets, prevent regressions with automated checks, and improve DORA delivery metrics.
• Lead Security and Privacy: Be the accountable owner for Security and Privacy. Keep us up to date and ahead of Platform Security requirements.
• Manage Operations and Reliability: Lead the Operations team. Set Service Level Objectives with error budgets, design graceful degradation and failover, define on‑call and runbooks, and drive post‑incident reviews that deliver durable fixes.
• Build Observability and Error Monitoring: Standardize logs, metrics, traces, and real‑time error and crash reporting across backend and clients. Create actionable, SLO‑based alerting and executive health dashboards.
• Improve Developer Productivity and the Software Development Lifecycle: Level up CI/CD, branching strategy, and change control. Add quality gates, static analysis, secret scanning, SBOM and dependency management, and supply chain controls.
• Drive FinOps: Own cloud budgets and forecasts. Improve commitment coverage, right‑size compute and storage. Report monthly on cost versus performance.
• Lead Incidents and Risk: Act as incident commander for high‑severity issues. Run table‑tops, keep risks tracked with owners and dates, and prevent recurrences.
• Mentor and Develop Leaders: Coach Tech Leads and senior ICs. Set expectations for design docs, code reviews, and outcomes. Build a culture of clear ownership and a bias toward delivering.
• Partner Cross‑Functionally: Work with Product, Legal, Finance, and Player Success to align technical plans with business goals and regulatory needs.
• Leverage AI as a force multiplier: Use AI to accelerate development and operations (code assist, test generation, incident triage, analytics).
• Own SRED: Create an auditable process with eligibility gates in Jira, contemporaneous notes, and artifact capture. Partner with Finance for accurate, on‑time claims.

• 10+ years in software engineering with 3+ years as a principal‑level platform/architecture leader
• Proven experience operating high‑availability, high‑throughput consumer systems
• Strong AWS background (IAM, VPC, EC2/ECS/Fargate, S3, KMS, GuardDuty, Security Hub, CloudTrail, Config)
• Infrastructure‑as‑code proficiency (Terraform or CDK) and CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions or equivalent)
• Security and privacy ownership in platform‑reviewed environments
• SRE and performance engineering expertise (SLOs, incident management, load/perf testing, graceful degradation)
• Data architecture across relational and non‑relational systems
• Observability stack experience (Graylog, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana or Datadog, ELK or OpenSearch; Sentry/Crashlytics, Backtrace or equivalent)
• Production experience applying AI to speed development and operations
• Clear communicator who influences across product, engineering, legal, and finance

• Unity, HTML5/JavaScript, and/or PHP game platform experience
• Prior responsibility for FinOps and vendor negotiations
• Experience running SRED or similar R&D incentive programs
• Experience with Mongo and/or MySQL

Salary

($140,000 - $200,000)

The listed pay range reflects the potential earnings for this role. Actual compensation will depend on experience, skills, and alignment with company needs, typically falling toward the midpoint for most candidates