Principal Software Engineer

Are you passionate about building large-scale backend systems that power experiences for millions of players worldwide?

Do you thrive on solving complex engineering challenges, influencing technical direction across teams, and mentoring other engineers? We are looking for a Principal Backend Software Engineer to join our Backend Engineering team in Candy Crush Saga and help shape the future of our game as well as the engineering practices at King.

This is a role for someone who combines deep technical expertise with strong leadership and collaboration skills. You will help drive architectural decisions, improve engineering standards, and build scalable backend systems that support highly available live game experiences.

Your role within our Kingdom

As a Principal Backend Software Engineer, you will work closely with engineers, operators, product managers, QA, analysts, and technical leaders across multiple teams and domains. You will lead the design and evolution of backend systems, drive end-to-end technical initiatives, and help teams make sound architectural and operational decisions.

You will act as a technical leader within the organisation, partnering with stakeholders across business units to balance scalability, reliability, performance, and business impact.

As part of the Backend Engineering team at Candy, you will work on developing backend systems for in-game features that operate at massive scale, supporting millions of players and highly distributed live services. We are looking for someone who enjoys tackling complex technical problems, improving engineering culture, and helping teams succeed.

Skills to create thrills

• Strong professional experience with Java 17+ and modern backend development practices.
• Deep understanding of API design, distributed systems, and backend system architecture.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building scalable backend services and end-to-end system integrations.
• Experience working with gRPC and/or JSON-RPC based services.
• Solid understanding of dependency injection patterns and software design principles.
• Experience with Gradle , Docker and operating services on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• Strong understanding of system reliability, observability, incident management, and operational excellence.
• Ability to design, architect, test, document, and implement backend services and technical solutions.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills across technical and non-technical audiences.
• Passion for mentoring engineers, improving engineering culture, and raising quality standards.
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity, evaluating trade-offs, and making pragmatic technical decisions.

Tasty bonus skills

Have any experience with one or some of the following areas? Then we sure like to hear about them!

• Experience working in gaming, live services, or large-scale consumer platforms.
• Experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and modern developer tooling.
• Knowledge of event-driven architectures and asynchronous systems.
• Knowledge of performance optimization and scalability best practices.

A Great Saga Needs All Sorts of Heroes

Making games is fun. Especially when you do it with people who share the same idea of what makes a good workplace great. We design games for everyone, no matter where they are or who they are, and we employ all sorts of people from all kinds of backgrounds to bring them to life.

Truth is, we simply cannot expect diversity in our players and originality in our games without first nurturing it in our people. A great saga needs all sorts of heroes.

Making the World Playful

Making the World Playful is what inspires us to create new experiences and raise the bar. It’s what makes King a place where we can all dream bigger, continue to add innovation to our games, broaden our portfolio, and explore new opportunities.

We take the art and science of gaming to the next level through our curiosity for the unexplored, passion for games, respect for each other, and love for our players — and we’re not afraid to have fun along the way.

There has never been a better time to join us. If you share our passion, our values, and our hunger to shape the future, join us in Making the World Playful!

About King

With a mission of Making the World Playful, King is a leading interactive entertainment company with more than 20 years of history of delivering some of the world’s most iconic games in the mobile gaming industry, including the world-famous Candy Crush franchise, as well as other mobile game hits such as Farm Heroes Saga. King games are played by more than 200 million monthly active users. King, part of Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), has Kingsters in Stockholm, Malmö, London, Barcelona, Berlin, Dublin, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Malta. More information can be found at King.com or by following us on LinkedIn, @lifeatking on Instagram, or @king_games on X.