Principal Engineer (Scala)

Prodege, LLC is a cutting-edge marketing and consumer insights platform that seeks to enhance its technical capabilities through the hiring of a Principal Engineer focused on Scala. This role involves defining and driving architectural strategies for backend systems, improving platform reliability, and mentoring engineering teams to achieve high-impact initiatives.

Responsibilities:

• Own Technical Strategy and Architecture for a Core Domain
• Define target architecture and reference patterns for Scala/Java services in a key domain (e.g., core APIs, monetization/yield services, identity/entitlements, data capture/streaming, experimentation)
• Create architectural decision records (ADRs), standards, and guidelines that enable teams to scale safely
• Evaluate tradeoffs (build vs buy, monolith vs services, sync vs async) and guide decisions with measurable outcomes
• Drive Cross-Team Delivery of High-Impact Initiatives
• Lead design and execution for complex initiatives spanning multiple teams and systems (roadmap alignment, technical sequencing, dependency management)
• Partner with Product/Engineering leadership to shape scope, timelines, and risk mitigation plans
• Unblock teams by resolving deep technical constraints and providing clear integration paths
• Raise Reliability, Resiliency, and Performance at Scale
• Identify systemic reliability risks and implement durable fixes (architecture changes, runtime safeguards, capacity strategies)
• Drive performance and scalability programs (SLOs/SLAs, load testing, latency budgets, capacity planning)
• Establish incident learnings into repeatable improvements (runbooks, automation, error budgets, resiliency patterns)
• Standardize Platform Patterns, Tooling, and Engineering Excellence
• Create reusable frameworks, service templates, and libraries to reduce cognitive load and improve consistency
• Improve engineering productivity by streamlining CI/CD, test strategy, and developer workflows in partnership with platform teams
• Set code quality and review standards; raise the bar on observability and maintainability across teams
• Strengthen Security, Governance, and Operational Maturity
• Embed secure-by-design principles into architecture and team practices (data handling, access patterns, secrets, dependency hygiene)
• Partner with Security/Compliance to meet governance needs with minimal delivery friction
• Ensure operational readiness for critical changes (release strategies, rollback plans, monitoring/alerting completeness)
• Mentor and Multiply Engineering Effectiveness Across the Org
• Mentor Senior Engineers and Tech Leads through technical coaching, design reviews, and architecture forums
• Lead knowledge sharing: brown bags, documentation, best practices, and reference implementations
• Influence engineering culture through pragmatic standards, clarity, and high ownership
• Cross-Functional Collaboration
• Participate in cross-functional and business-critical meetings, initiatives, and relationship-building activities, including occasional international travel of approximately 5%–10% as required

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
• Ten or more (10+) years of software engineering experience with significant backend/distributed systems ownership
• Deep expertise building large-scale backend systems using one or more core languages relevant to Prodege's environment, such as Scala, Java, PHP, or Golang, including service architecture, runtime behavior, and performance tuning
• Deep experience leading the design and scaling of AI-enabled systems across teams—e.g., defining architecture for LLM/ML platform integration, evaluation and quality frameworks, safety/guardrails, and reliability/cost controls—plus a track record of guiding standards and patterns that enable multiple teams to deliver AI features predictably in production
• Demonstrated ability to lead multi-team technical initiatives and influence roadmap decisions through strong technical judgment
• Strong track record of operational ownership for critical systems (incident management, postmortems, reliability improvements)
• Deep production experience in Scala and Java for high-scale backend systems
• Proven architecture leadership across multiple services/systems and teams
• Expertise in distributed systems, reliability engineering, and performance optimization
• Strong operational ownership: observability, incident response, postmortems, and long-term remediation
• Ability to influence without authority through technical clarity, collaboration, and strong communication
• Must be able to accommodate occasional international travel (approximately 5%–10%) in support of the role
• Experience with large-scale streaming/event systems and data pipelines
• Experience building internal platforms or shared frameworks used by multiple teams
• Experience with Kubernetes, service meshes, and cloud cost/performance optimization
• Background in ad-tech, offer/rewards ecosystems, fraud/risk systems, or experimentation at scale