Principal Software Engineer

Description

We take play seriously. We’re looking for curious adventurers ready to find their party, fueled by imagination and drive to build what’s never been built before. At Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast, you’ll collaborate with passionate teams to reimagine our iconic brands and create experiences that spark joy, connection, and community through the magic of play. This is your chance to shape legendary play that lasts a lifetime.

Job Overview

The Digital Innovations Team (DigIT) is changing how Wizards develops, delivers, and manages the digital systems behind our games — for players, retailers, and the studios that develop our worlds. We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer who can guide product ideas through every stage with agentic AI — from defining the problem with business partners, to developing the system, to deploying it in production, and then improving it based on actual data.

This role is hands-on. We need a creator who builds and ships with agentic AI. Someone who has directly shipped product to production by agentic AI, can provide the code and performance assessments, and can discuss in detail what was successful, what did not succeed, and what they would do differently. If you have built and shipped with agentic AI and want to keep building, we'd love to hear from you.

You will be responsible for the technical direction of an initiative and the related product surface area, direct tech direction and product direction with or without Product Manager (PM) support. You are answerable for what the team delivers, how quickly it adapts, and the business outcomes that result.

You will build products with agentic AI as your default approach, using the harness engineering and guardrails the team has developed and helping evolve them alongside peers. Your primary focus is shipping product, and you bring production-based judgment about evaluations, guardrails, cost, latency, determinism, and delivering AI products responsibly at scale.

Responsibilities

• Guide product concepts through the entire process with agentic AI. Starting from outlining the problem alongside product and business collaborators, moving to prototype development, to a data-informed launch, and then refining based on actual usage data. You are responsible for the full journey, not only a segment of it.
• Build, hands-on with agentic AI. Keep close to the code. Deliver production-quality agent systems, analyses, prompts, and supporting services on your own. Set the standard for agentic AI development through delivered, working results rather than discussion.
• Direct the build process through data-driven insights. Lead product ideas as testable hypotheses. Start tracking early and confirm success criteria before coding begins, with or without PM support. Base decisions on actual data concerning what to prioritize, change, or remove. Ensure the feedback loop is as short as feasible.
• Contribute to the department's agentic AI harness engineering alongside peers. Apply, stress-test, and improve shared patterns — LLMs, agents, Skills, Model Context Protocol (MCP), eval frameworks, guardrails — through real production use. Bring back what works and what doesn't from the field.
• Raise the engineering bar on architecture, code review, test strategy, observability, evals, and incident quality. Treat engineering excellence as a baseline expectation, not an optional initiative.
• Provide technical leadership and influence both people and product decisions. Make your EM and PM more effective in their roles.
• Contribute to the hiring bar. Lead technical interviews, calibrate the AI-capability signal in our hiring loop, and mentor the next layer of senior and staff engineers.
• What You'll Bring
• Direct experience creating agentic AI systems. You have developed, deployed, and improved agentic systems in real-world settings, beyond demos or proofs of concept. You can describe the code you authored, the tests you designed, the prompt and tool usage changes you made, the cost and latency considerations you evaluated, the failure types you managed, and the metrics you used to choose the next release. Interviews will involve a hands-on agentic AI task.
• Over 10 years of full-stack software engineering experience. At least 3 years in a Tech Lead, Staff, or Principal role responsible for guiding the technical direction of a team or program.
• Product-engineer approach. You transform product ideas into operational, monitored, live software. You are comfortable prioritizing alongside PM or direct Product direction on your own, making product tradeoffs on the fly, and relying on metrics to guide iteration. You do not need a fully-detailed ticket to begin.
• Deep proficiency across the stack. Modern JavaScript / TypeScript and at least one of Go, Python, or C. You write production code, not just review it.
• Strong systems and infrastructure foundation. AWS at scale, containerization, GitLab/GitHub CI/CD, PostgreSQL and data modeling, REST / gRPC / GraphQL API development, test automation, and a real point of view on observability and reliability.
• Architectural judgment. You can defend a build decision, change your mind when the evidence warrants it, and write the build doc that brings the rest of the team along.
• Business and product literacy. You can sit with a creative director, a retail partner, or a finance collaborator and have a conversation that is not purely technical. You can articulate business impact and tradeoffs without losing technical rigor.
• Outstanding communication and collaboration. You make engineers around you better. You raise standards without becoming a bottleneck. You handle disagreement directly and well.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience. Computer Science, Information Technology, or comparable work experience.
• What Sets You Apart
• Experience leading or contributing to platform / horizontal services (search, notifications, identity, eventing, workflow, data platforms) 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 (Tech Lead (TL) / EM / PM) or similar matrixed engineering model.
• Foundational knowledge of Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, or the tabletop gaming space.
• Who We Are
• We’re a team of creators, storytellers, and innovators united under the Hasbro family and home to beloved brands, AAA digital games studios and immersive experiences that spark imagination across generations. Together, we’re committed to a culture rooted in creativity, excellence, curiosity, and inclusion, and where every employee is empowered to think boldly, act with integrity, and spark joy for all.
• Hasbro About the Company – Hasbro
• Wizards of the Coast Who We Are – Wizards of the Coast

Conditions

This role is based at our Renton, Washington office and follows a hybrid schedule designed to support in-person collaboration. Employees are expected to work onsite on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, with the flexibility to work remotely or onsite on Mondays and Fridays.

$172,600 - $259,000 USD

Employees may be eligible for annual and long-term incentives as part of their overall compensation package, depending on role, location, and eligibility. Benefits and programs may include:

Health & Wellness

Time Off to Recharge

Financial Well-being

Life & Family Support

Volunteer and Community Initiatives

Learning & Development

Exclusive Perks