Principal Engineer

Beschreibung:

Craft:Technology & Development

Job Description:
King's second largest game, Candy Crush Soda Saga, is loved by millions of players worldwide, matching Swedish fish, rescued Soda gummy bears, and popped soda bottles to win points, defeat obstacles and progress through almost 20,000 levels. We're an iconic team growing a sweeter future for one of the biggest casual mobile IPs in the world through attracting talented people from around the world. Our ambition is to keep delivering for our players when it comes to creativity, product, and technology.

As a Principal Engineer in the Content Distribution team within Candy Crush Soda Saga's Gameplay and Monetisation Domain, you'll drive the technical depth and direction of how Soda delivers fresh content to players and continuously improves its level progression at scale. This is an individual contributor role, focused on leading through deep technical judgment, hands-on craft and mentorship.

Your Role Within the Kingdom

* Set technical direction across Content Distribution's systems - content delivery pipelines, automated level optimisation driven by live player data, AI-driven tooling for level generation and modification, and the broader tooling that level design relies on.
* Tackle the most complex technical problems in your area - from architecture through to performance, scalability and long-term maintainability for a game that's been running live for over a decade.
* Contribute high-quality code on a regular basis - C++ in the game codebase, and Python or similar scripting for tooling and automation work - with strong attention to quality, reliability and performance.
* Drive solution discovery on major initiatives - exploring options with clear trade-offs, surfacing technical risks early, and helping the team make sound engineering decisions on speed and quality.
* Mentor engineers within the team and across the Domain - growing their craft through hands-on contribution, code review, design feedback and sound engineering judgment.
* Collaborate closely with engineers, level designers, data scientists, product managers and King's centralised tech teams - and build tools, scripts and documentation that empower these partners to do more themselves and ship faster.
* Champion engineering quality, standards and ways of working - contributing to shared engineering standards across Soda and the wider tech community at King.
* Apply AI development tools with discipline, contribute to AI-driven internal tooling, and share patterns and learnings with engineering peers.
* Use live data, player insights and A/B test results to inform your decisions and your team's technical choices.

Skills to Create Thrills

Key Attributes

* Thoughtful and pragmatic - a problem solver who turns complex technical challenges into clear, actionable solutions, with reliable estimates and a willingness to explain the why.
* A collaborative technical leader who is humble and open, and builds trust across disciplines.
* Quality-focused and outcome-oriented, with a strong sense of ownership for the technical health of the systems you work on and the impact of your team's work on players and the business.

Experience

* A track record of leading or owning complex technical work in game development, content tooling or similarly demanding software environments - with the ability to solve hard problems independently and shape the path forward.
* Experience designing, building and evolving systems, pipelines or tooling at scale in a production setting, ideally in a high-scale or game-as-a-service context.
* Experience mentoring engineers and providing technical leadership across teams without formal people-management responsibility.

Knowledge & Skills

* Strong C++ skills for the game codebase, plus comfort with scripting languages such as Python for tooling, pipelines and automation - in large, long-lived codebases.
* Deep familiarity with modern software engineering practices (testing, code review, CI, observability) and a track record of contributing to and upholding shared engineering standards.
* Solid grasp of engineering at scale - reliability, throughput and maintainability of long-lived tooling and pipelines that operate across thousands of levels.
* Working knowledge of AI, ML and agentic workflows - including practical experience with AI development tools, awareness of their risks and limits, and the ability to advocate for thoughtful adoption.
* Comfort working in an experimentation-driven environment - able to design, interpret and act on A/B tests, and to use live data to guide technical decisions.
* Ability to communicate clearly with engineers, designers, data scientists, product managers and stakeholders, translating between technical and business perspectives.

How We Work

Our Team First, Hybrid Working model empowers teams across the Kingdom to decide how they want to work together, with a mix of in office and home working.

If you're excited about this role but don't meet every single requirement, we'd still love to hear from you. We know that candidates from underrepresented backgrounds may hesitate to apply unless they match every point, and we're interested in your potential as well as your experience.

About King
With a mission of Making the World Playful, King is a leading interactive entertainment company with more than 20 years of history of delivering some of the world's most iconic games in the mobile gaming industry, including the world-famous Candy Crush franchise, as well as other mobile game hits such as Farm Heroes Saga. King games are played by more than 200 million monthly active users. King, part of Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), has Kingsters in Stockholm, Malmö, London, Barcelona, Berlin, Dublin, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Malta. More information can be found at King.com or by following us on LinkedIn, @lifeatking on Instagram, or @king_games on X