Principal Engineer

Principal Engineer – Internationalisation Programme (Go, Kubernetes, Kafka, Cassandra, Postgres)

A global sports business is taking its platform international, and we need the architecture lead for the programme. You will be the subject-matter expert the whole programme leans on. That means guiding the shared services work, keeping the flagship consumer app on track, and covering the platform wherever services meet. It is a broad remit, and it is hands-on.

The programme

The client's shared services team supports several business lines. They are internationalising their flagship app alongside the shared services behind it, such as identity, loyalty and partner integrations. The first target is an isolated region with its own data-residency stack. Multi-region rollouts follow through 2027.

What you will work on

• Setting the architecture direction across the shared services, and making sure each one can run inside an isolated region with no hidden dependency on the original one.
• Keeping the flagship app's internationalisation coherent as the services underneath it change.
• Owning the seams: how the shared services interact across and within regions.
• Data residency: deciding what data is shared, what stays regional and what never leaves a region, across Cassandra and Postgres.
• Kafka in both worlds: self-contained within an isolated region, and replicated across regions where it is needed.
• Terraform and Kubernetes that stand up a new region repeatably, with explicit regional config and visible drift.
• Cross functional stakeholder management. You will be the glue between multiple teams. 

In your first two weeks you will review what the client's team has already built for the first region. You will come back with an honest verdict on what holds up, what will block an isolated launch, and what will make multi-region harder later.

You will likely have

• Stood production systems up in new, isolated regions under data-residency rules, and taken systems multi-region, including the data and failover decisions.
• Been the architecture lead across several teams or services, not just one.
• Current, senior Go, and enough React to change it with confidence.
• Deep working knowledge of Cassandra, Postgres and Kafka in distributed setups.
• Kubernetes and Terraform experience at the level of designing platforms, not just using them.
• The confidence to say "this will not work" to a client, with evidence.
• A habit of making the engineers around you better.

You do not need experience in the client's industry, or with a specific cloud provider. AI tools are welcome in your workflow; we expect you to understand and own every line you ship.