Founding Principal Architect: AI-Driven Real-Time Platform

Global Sports Jobs Limited; United Kingdom; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Global Sports Jobs Limited is seeking a senior software engineer to own the technology behind Ventures products, from 0 to 1 and beyond, with hands-on full-stack focus and strong backend systems emphasis for scalable, real-time experiences.

You will architect end-to-end across backend services, cloud infra, and web/mobile clients, building with AI coding agents as a core workflow and ensuring robust production operations.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including taking consumer products from 0 → 1 and operating them in production.
• Deep backend expertise designing, building, and operating scalable distributed systems.
• Experience with event-driven and real-time architectures.
• Strong data modelling across relational, document, and in-memory stores.
• Experience running production services in the cloud with infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and observability.
• Experience building software with AI coding agents, or a strong, demonstrable interest in doing so; essential for the role.
• Enough web and mobile fluency to architect features end to end and review client designs.
• Proven ability to own a system end to end and make sound technical decisions independently.
• Experience shipping user-facing changes safely with feature flags, staged rollouts, and production monitoring.
• Takes ownership of outcomes, not just tasks.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical architecture and direction of Ventures products end to end, across backend services, cloud infrastructure, and web and native iOS and Android clients, and take new ideas from 0 → 1 by building testable versions quickly to generate evidence before hardening what works for growth.
• Design, build, and operate scalable backend systems, including gRPC services, event streaming, and durable workflows that serve real-time experiences around live sport, and build platform capabilities such as social, predictions and live content that multiple products can share.
• Architect for scale and failure, covering fan-out cost, backpressure, idempotency, reconnect behaviour, data growth, and recovery as audiences grow.
• Design features end to end across service and client boundaries, including API and data contracts, real-time delivery, and local-first sync on mobile, partnering with client leads on web, iOS, and Android implementation.
• Build with AI coding agents as a core part of the workflow, and own the tooling, guardrails, and review practices that let agents work safely and quickly across the codebase.
• Own production, including environments, deployments, infrastructure as code, observability, incident response, and the cost of cloud and third-party services.
• Release user-facing changes safely through feature flags, staged rollouts, and tested rollback plans, holding every launch to EA's bar for load, security, localisation, and monitoring.
• Integrate with EA platform services such as identity, moderation, and security, and with third-party sports data and AI providers.
• Set the engineering standard for code review, testing, documentation, and architectural decisions, keeping fast-moving codebases maintainable, and support and onboard new engineers while sharing architecture patterns and AI-native practices across Ventures.
• Partner with product and design to shape roadmaps, turning ideas into technical plans with clear trade-offs.

Skills

Backend architecture

Distributed systems

Event-driven

Data modelling

Cloud infrastructure

CI/CD

Observability

AI agents

Web/mobile architecture

System ownership

Tools

gRPC

Protocol Buffers

NATS JetStream

Kafka

Temporal

PostgreSQL

Firestore

Redis

GKE

Pulumi

Terraform

OpenTelemetry

Job description

Global Sports Jobs Limited is seeking a senior software engineer to own the technology behind Ventures products, from 0 to 1 and beyond, with hands-on full-stack focus and strong backend systems emphasis for scalable, real-time experiences.

You will architect end-to-end across backend services, cloud infra, and web/mobile clients, building with AI coding agents as a core workflow and ensuring robust production operations.