[Hiring] Principal Founding Engineer @Electronic Arts

Role Description

Electronic Arts creates next-level entertainment experiences that inspire players and fans around the world. We are seeking an experienced Founding Engineer to own the technology behind our Ventures products as they go from 0 → 1 and beyond. This is a hands-on, full-stack role with a strong lean towards scalable backend systems.

• Help 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.
• Take new ideas from 0 → 1: build testable versions quickly to generate evidence, then harden 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.
• Build platform capabilities, such as social, predictions, and live content, that several products and existing EA games can share.
• Architect for scale and failure: 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.
• Build with AI coding agents as a core part of your 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.
• 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.
• Partner with product and design to shape roadmaps, turning ideas into technical plans with clear trade-offs.
• Support and onboard new engineers joining the team, and share architecture patterns and AI-native practices across Ventures.

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, ideally in Go with gRPC and Protocol Buffers.
• Experience with event-driven and real-time architectures, ideally including message streaming such as NATS JetStream or Kafka, and durable workflow engines such as Temporal.
• Strong data modelling across relational, document, and in-memory stores, ideally PostgreSQL, Firestore, and Redis.
• Experience running production services in the cloud, ideally Google Cloud and Kubernetes (GKE), with infrastructure as code such as Pulumi or Terraform, CI/CD, and observability through OpenTelemetry or similar.
• Experience building software with AI coding agents, or a strong, demonstrable interest in doing so.
• Enough web and mobile fluency to architect features end to end and review client designs, ideally with SwiftUI on iOS, Kotlin with Jetpack Compose on Android and React on Web.
• 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.
• Experience building real-time, social, sports, gaming, or entertainment products, or as a founding engineer, is a strong plus.
• Experience building LLM-powered or agentic product features is a plus.

Requirements

• Takes ownership of outcomes, not just tasks.
• Pragmatic judgement about speed, quality, and scale, with strong attention to detail.
• Comfortable with ambiguity, and ready to change course when the evidence says so.
• Clear communicator who can explain technical trade-offs to engineers, product, and leadership.
• Collaborative partner to client leads, product, design, and partner teams.
• Generous with knowledge, and effective at bringing new engineers up to speed.
• Curious about how AI is changing software development, and keen to help shape it.
• Commitment to inclusivity, trust, and continuous improvement.

Benefits

• Healthcare coverage
• Mental well-being support
• Retirement savings
• Paid time off
• Family leaves
• Complimentary games
• Holistic approach to wellness