Principal Software Engineer
Renton · USD 172,600-259,000 / year · 10+ years experience · Posted Oct 9, 2026
At a glance
- Experience
- 10+ years experience
- Location
- Renton
- Salary
- USD 172,600-259,000 / year
About the role
- The Digital Innovations Team (DigIT) at Wizards of the Coast is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to guide product ideas through every stage using agentic AI.
- You will be responsible for the technical direction of an initiative and the related product surface area, directing tech and product direction with or without PM support.
- This is a hands-on creator role focused on building products using agentic AI as a default development approach.
Responsibilities
- Guide product concepts through the entire process with agentic AI, from outlining the problem to prototype development, data-informed launch, and refinement based on actual usage data.
- Build hands-on with agentic AI, delivering production-quality agent systems, analyses, prompts, and supporting services independently.
- Direct the build process through data-driven insights, leading product ideas as testable hypotheses and basing decisions on actual data.
- Contribute to the department's agentic AI harness engineering alongside peers, applying and improving shared patterns like LLMs, agents, Skills, MCP, eval frameworks, and guardrails.
- Raise the engineering bar on architecture, code review, test strategy, observability, evals, and incident quality.
- Lead position, influencing people and product decisions while making engineering managers and product managers more effective.
- Contribute to the hiring bar by leading technical interviews, calibrating AI-capability signals, and mentoring senior and staff engineers.
Requirements
- Direct experience creating, deploying, and improving agentic AI systems in real-world settings beyond demos or proofs of concept.
- Over 10 years of full-stack software engineering experience, including at least 3 years in a Tech Lead, Staff, or Principal role.
- Product-engineer approach to transform product ideas into operational, monitored, live software using metrics to guide iteration.
- Deep proficiency across the stack, including modern JavaScript / TypeScript and at least one of Go, Python, or C#.
- Strong systems and infrastructure foundation including AWS at scale, containerization, GitLab/GitHub CI/CD, PostgreSQL and data modeling, and REST / gRPC / GraphQL API development.
- Architectural judgment to defend build decisions, change stance when warranted, and write build documentation.
- Business and product literacy to converse with non-technical partners and articulate business impact and tradeoffs.
- Outstanding communication and collaboration skills to elevate team standards and manage disagreement directly.
- Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a comparable field.
Preferred qualifications
- Experience leading or contributing to platform / horizontal services consumed by multiple product teams.
- Experience with Product Lifecycle Management (PLM).
- Experience with Kubernetes, Akamai, Terraform, or equivalent infrastructure-as-code tooling.
- Experience operating in a tri-lead (TL / EM / PM) or similar matrixed engineering model.
- Foundational knowledge of Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, or the tabletop gaming space.
Benefits
- Health & Wellness
- Time Off to Recharge
- Financial Well-being
- Life & Family Support
- Volunteer and Community Initiatives
- Learning & Development
- Exclusive Perks
- Annual and long-term incentives
Skills
- JavaScript
- TypeScript
- Go
- Python
- C#
- AWS
- GitLab
- GitHub CI/CD
- PostgreSQL
- REST
- gRPC
- GraphQL
Show all 15 skills
- Kubernetes
- Terraform
- Akamai
