Kano · 2 days ago
Principal Engineer
United States
Full-time
Remote
Lead/Staff
$140K/yr - $200K/yr
10+ years expKano is a remote-first gaming company focused on creating engaging experiences for players. They are seeking a hands-on Principal Engineer to lead Technical Excellence, Security and Privacy, and Platform Operations across all products while mentoring engineering leaders and managing the Operations team.
AppsMobileOnline GamesVideo Games
Responsibilities
Drive Technical Excellence: Define and drive a studio‑wide program for quality, performance, and continuous improvement. Establish performance budgets, prevent regressions with automated checks, and improve DORA delivery metrics
Lead Security and Privacy: Be the accountable owner for Security and Privacy. Keep us up to date and ahead of Platform Security requirements
Manage Operations and Reliability: Lead the Operations team. Set Service Level Objectives with error budgets, design graceful degradation and failover, define on‑call and runbooks, and drive post‑incident reviews that deliver durable fixes
Build Observability and Error Monitoring: Standardize logs, metrics, traces, and real‑time error and crash reporting across backend and clients. Create actionable, SLO‑based alerting and executive health dashboards
Improve Developer Productivity and the Software Development Lifecycle: Level up CI/CD, branching strategy, and change control. Add quality gates, static analysis, secret scanning, SBOM and dependency management, and supply chain controls
Drive FinOps: Own cloud budgets and forecasts. Improve commitment coverage, right‑size compute and storage. Report monthly on cost versus performance
Lead Incidents and Risk: Act as incident commander for high‑severity issues. Run table‑tops, keep risks tracked with owners and dates, and prevent recurrences
Mentor and Develop Leaders: Coach Tech Leads and senior ICs. Set expectations for design docs, code reviews, and outcomes. Build a culture of clear ownership and a bias toward delivering
Partner Cross‑Functionally: Work with Product, Legal, Finance, and Player Success to align technical plans with business goals and regulatory needs
Leverage AI as a force multiplier: Use AI to accelerate development and operations (code assist, test generation, incident triage, analytics)
Own SRED: Create an auditable process with eligibility gates in Jira, contemporaneous notes, and artifact capture. Partner with Finance for accurate, on‑time claims
Qualification
Required
10+ years in software engineering with 3+ years as a principal‑level platform/architecture leader
Proven experience operating high‑availability, high‑throughput consumer systems
Strong AWS background (IAM, VPC, EC2/ECS/Fargate, S3, KMS, GuardDuty, Security Hub, CloudTrail, Config)
Infrastructure‑as‑code proficiency (Terraform or CDK) and CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions or equivalent)
Security and privacy ownership in platform‑reviewed environments
SRE and performance engineering expertise (SLOs, incident management, load/perf testing, graceful degradation)
Data architecture across relational and non‑relational systems
Observability stack experience (Graylog, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana or Datadog, ELK or OpenSearch; Sentry/Crashlytics, Backtrace or equivalent)
Production experience applying AI to speed development and operations
Clear communicator who influences across product, engineering, legal, and finance
Preferred
Unity, HTML5/JavaScript, and/or PHP game platform experience
Prior responsibility for FinOps and vendor negotiations
Experience running SRED or similar R&D incentive programs
Experience with Mongo and/or MySQL
Benefits
Competitive wages determined by market research
Uncapped profit share program
Health, dental and vision benefits
3 weeks vacation to start
Paid holiday shutdown in December
12 paid Care Days per year
Yearly Continuous Improvement allowance
Company
Kano
Kano creates meaningful connections through lasting social games.
11-50 employees
Funding
Current Stage
Early StageTotal Funding
unknownKey Investors
Microsoft
2019-06-19Corporate Round
Company data provided by crunchbase