Principal Software Engineer (Backend Engineer)

At Fandom, this Principal Engineer role reports to the VP of Engineering and works with the Data Platform team. you will be a technical leader who builds engagement and monetizes the experiences from both an architectural and systems design perspective, for over 300 million monthly users across Fandom sites and applications. You will be a top technical leader throughout all of Fandom. You Will…

• Have a Broad Technical Impact
• You will oversee this technical area from an architectural and systems design perspective, leading other engineers, and working side-by-side with them to discover and implement solutions.
• You will be a top technical leader throughout all of Fandom and communicate across a variety of audiences is imperative.
• Execute with the Future in Mind
• You will be one that must always think about the future, not overbuilding for it, and finding that right balance of developing solutions for current issues while not over-engineering for issues we are not sure we’ll need to solve for
• Always have a plan for potential future issues and growth opportunities.
• Stay up to date with all applicable new technology innovations happening in the industry, and know when is the right time to bring new thoughts and potential infrastructure changes into discussions, with an understanding of the trade-offs and potential impact on overall tech-debt.
• Be Accountable
• Provide technical leadership for impactful projects that involve multiple teams and span multiple technologies and systems
• Lead large projects or large pieces of projects depending on the project scale
• Proactivity identify risks and opportunities to improve our processes and technologies
• Influence other senior leaders on engineering strategy
• Lead Key Initiatives
• Work with the Data Science team to build and scale Recommendations for TV, Movie, and Games both inline in the User’s experience and as stand-alone pages
• Stream user pageview and action-event data into a system that develops a dynamic Profile of each user to be used to Personalize their experiences in many ways
• Scale out our Gamification systems to encourage users to develop high-quality content and be rewarded for their efforts
• Use all of the above to find new ways to monetize the users’ experiences through Affiliate, E-Commerce, Display, and hopefully many more types of future revenue streams

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with a track-record of back-end development, design and architecture
• Expertise in a modern form of 1 or more of the following languages: Java, Python, Golang, Kotlin
• Designing and architecting scaled-up back-end systems (Kafka, MySQL, NoSQL, MongoDB, Neo4j), with expertise in both relational and nonrelational systems and when it is necessary to choose each one
• A high degree of proficiency in how to optimize full-stack web systems, in cached environments.
• Experience building large user personalization, recommendation and search-based systems with an average monthly base of at least 50-100M monthly users
• Deep experience as an expert and technical leader for large Engineering teams.
• Experience explaining complicated technical plans to a variety of audiences.
• A mindset that is business-oriented, collaborative, and comfortable with mentoring others

Bonus Points if You Have…

• A passion for fandoms and an interest in building products for fan communities around the world.
• Contributed to open-source projects