Senior Principal Engineer / Software Architect – Real-Time Multiplayer Gaming

About the Role We are a leading poker software development company building and evolving large-scale real-time multiplayer gaming platforms. We are looking for a Senior Principal Engineer / Software Architect with strong experience in real-time systems, distributed architecture, scalability, and low-latency networking. You will work with our engineering leadership to review our existing platform, identify bottlenecks, improve architecture, and help build a scalable foundation for long-term growth. Key Responsibilities Review and improve our existing real-time poker platform architecture. Design scalable, reliable, low-latency backend systems. Identify performance bottlenecks and architectural limitations. Improve WebSocket communication, synchronization, and game-state management. Optimize Redis, MongoDB, Node.js, and messaging infrastructure. Design distributed and event-driven services. Conduct architecture and code reviews. Guide and mentor senior developers. Provide practical solutions for modernizing the existing platform. Help define long-term technical architecture and roadmap. Required Experience 10+ years of software engineering experience. Strong experience with real-time, high-concurrency systems. Expert knowledge of Node.js and TypeScript. Strong WebSocket / Socket Programming experience. Strong understanding of distributed systems and event-driven architecture. Experience with Redis and MongoDB. Experience with RabbitMQ, Kafka, BullMQ, MQTT, or similar systems. Understanding of concurrency, distributed locking, synchronization, and fault tolerance. Experience with AWS and scalable production infrastructure. Kubernetes, CI/CD, monitoring, and logging experience is a plus. Preferred Experience Experience with poker, casino, betting, multiplayer gaming, fintech, trading, or other low-latency platforms is highly preferred. Experience handling thousands of concurrent users is a major advantage. What We Are Looking For We are looking for an architect who can analyze an existing complex system, identify where it may fail at higher scale, recommend practical improvements, and work with our team to implement them. This is not just a coding role. You will have significant influence over our technical architecture and long-term engineering direction. Engagement We are open to both full-time employment and long-term contract/project-based engagement. The initial work may include architecture assessment, performance review, bottleneck identification, architecture roadmap, and ongoing technical guidance. We are looking for someone who can become a long-term technical partner to our engineering team.