Principal Software Engineer

Overview

Lead the architecture, design and delivery of Bleacher Report's fan-facing products and the services that power them, from the GraphQL platform and real-time data pipelines down to the native mobile and web clients.

What you'll do

• Own end-to-end architecture across client applications (iOS, Android/TV, Web), the federated GraphQL API layer, 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.
• Architect low-latency, high-throughput, event-driven systems for real-time sports data (live scores, play-by-play, notifications) using Kafka, message queues and caching, designed for game-day traffic spikes.
• 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.
• Communicate effectively with engineering leadership, stakeholders and business functions to ensure alignment and a cohesive approach.

What you'll need

• 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).
• Experience building and operating Tier-1 systems (high uptime, strict SLAs) with real-time/low-latency requirements and large, spiky traffic.
• 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.

Nice to have

• 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 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.
• A demonstrated habit of continuously evaluating and adopting emerging technologies, piloting new tools, running proofs-of-concept, and setting the bar for how the team leverages AI to improve developer productivity and product experiences.
• Contributions to open-source projects or engagement with the GraphQL/streaming communities.

Details

• Location: Bangalore - Embassy Tech Village.
• Characteristics sought: naturally inquisitive, critical thinker, proactive problem-solver and detail-oriented; self-starter able to take projects from design to execution with minimal supervision; able to balance multiple competing priorities and meet deadlines; team player and relationship builder.