Principal Backend Engineer - Promo

What are we building? Hard Rock Digital is a fiercely focused team working to become the best online sportsbook, casino, and social gaming company in the world. We're building a deeply curious team with a passion for learning, operating, and building new products and technologies for millions of consumers. We're customer-obsessed — we care about each customer interaction, experience, behavior, and insight, and strive to ensure we're always acting authentically. Rooted in the kindred spirits of Hard Rock and the Seminole Tribe of Florida, Hard Rock Digital taps a brand known the world over as the leader in gaming, entertainment, and hospitality. We're taking that foundation of success and bringing it to the digital space - ready to join us? What’s the position? We’re looking for a Principal Backend Engineer to own technical direction for backend capabilities within the Promos domain, working within our shared service and cloud ecosystem. You will solve complex distributed systems problems, guide the evolution of APIs, events, data, and services, and raise the engineering bar across teams while remaining close to the code. Working across Product, Mobile, Web, Data, QA, Platform, Security, Compliance, and Operations, you will turn ambiguous needs into durable strategies and guide critical initiatives from discovery through production. Principal level impact means creating clarity beyond one team, developing other engineers, and being accountable for organizational outcomes, not only implementation. Your responsibilities will include: Technical strategy and architecture Own backend technical direction for the assigned product domain, such as Promos, while aligning with shared platform, cloud, data, and service standards. Partner with Principal and Staff Engineers and teams that own shared capabilities such as identity, payments, compliance, messaging, and platform services, integrating those capabilities while maintaining clear ownership boundaries. Guide architecture evolution and modernization, balancing product delivery, technical debt, scalability, and platform investment through pragmatic decisions, clear tradeoffs, and measurable outcomes. Lead major restructuring work through planned iterative delivery: establish the target end state before execution, decompose the initiative into sequenced tickets, surface dependencies and risks, and provide credible delivery dates that are updated as evidence changes. Promotional and backend capabilities Build scalable and reliable promotion lifecycle capabilities, including configuration, eligibility, activation, state transitions, rewards, expiration, auditability, idempotency, and recovery. Partner with Product, Mobile, Web, Back Office, Data, and Operations to define service boundaries, API and event contracts, experimentation, success measures, and operational controls. Design resilient services for high traffic and transaction volume, using appropriate data…