**This is an opportunity to work for a remote-first company. Only applicants living in British Columbia will be considered for the role. Must be legally eligible to work in Canada.**
The Opportunity
At Kano, we build communities through gaming experiences that connect millions of players worldwide. We’re looking for a Principal Engineer (P4 Software Developer) to provide senior technical leadership across our product and backend systems. This role is focused on system design, application architecture, and engineering decision-making - helping teams build scalable, maintainable software while balancing quality, speed, and long-term sustainability.
You’ll work closely with product, design, and engineering teams to guide architectural direction, set engineering standards, and support teams as systems grow in complexity. While you should be comfortable reasoning about infrastructure, pipelines, and security, this role is not a DevOps or SRE position. Your primary focus is on how software systems are designed and built, with day-to-day infrastructure or tooling ownership supported by your Operations team.
Location: Remote within British Columbia, Canada
What You’ll Do
- Drive Technical Excellence: Define and drive a studio‑wide program for quality, performance, and continuous improvement. Establish performance budgets, prevent regressions with automated checks, and improve DORA delivery metrics.
- Lead Security and Privacy: Be the accountable owner for Security and Privacy. Keep us up to date and ahead of Platform Security requirements.
- Manage Operations and Reliability: Lead the Operations team. Set Service Level Objectives with error budgets, design graceful degradation and failover, define on‑call and runbooks, and drive post‑incident reviews that deliver durable fixes.
- Build Observability and Error Monitoring: Standardize logs, metrics, traces, and real‑time error and crash reporting across backend and clients. Create actionable, SLO‑based alerting and executive health dashboards.
- Improve Developer Productivity and the Software Development Lifecycle: Level up CI/CD, branching strategy, and change control. Add quality gates, static analysis, secret scanning, SBOM and dependency management, and supply chain controls.
- Drive FinOps: Own cloud budgets and forecasts. Improve commitment coverage, right‑size compute and storage. Report monthly on cost versus performance.
- Lead Incidents and Risk: Act as incident commander for high‑severity issues. Run table‑tops, keep risks tracked with owners and dates, and prevent recurrences.
- Mentor and Develop Leaders: Coach Tech Leads and senior ICs. Set expectations for design docs, code reviews, and outcomes. Build a culture of clear ownership and a bias toward delivering.
- Partner Cross‑Functionally: Work with Product, Legal, Finance, and Player Success to align technical plans with business goals and regulatory needs.
- Leverage AI as a force multiplier: Use AI to accelerate development and operations (code assist, test generation, incident triage, analytics).
- Own SRED: Create an auditable process with eligibility gates in Jira, contemporaneous notes, and artifact capture. Partner with Finance for accurate, on‑time claims.
What You Bring
- 10+ years in software engineering with 3+ years as a Principal‑level platform/architecture leader
- Proven experience operating high‑availability, high‑throughput consumer systems
- Strong AWS background (IAM, VPC, EC2/ECS/Fargate, S3, KMS, GuardDuty, Security Hub, CloudTrail, Config)
- Infrastructure‑as‑code proficiency (Terraform or CDK) and CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions or equivalent)
- Security and privacy ownership in platform‑reviewed environments
- SRE and performance engineering expertise (SLOs, incident management, load/perf testing, graceful degradation)
- Data architecture across relational and non‑relational systems
- Observability stack experience (Graylog, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana or Datadog, ELK or OpenSearch; Sentry/Crashlytics, Backtrace or equivalent)
- Production experience applying AI to speed development and operations
- Clear communicator who influences across product, engineering, legal, and finance
Nice to Have
- Unity, HTML5/JavaScript, and/or PHP game platform experience
- Prior responsibility for FinOps and vendor negotiations
- Experience running SRED or similar R&D incentive programs
- Experience with Mongo and/or MySQL
Salary
($140,000 - $200,000)
The listed pay range reflects the potential earnings for this role. Actual compensation will depend on experience, skills, and alignment with company needs, typically falling toward the midpoint for most candidates
Kano is a remote-first workplace with an in-person attendance requirement 2-6 times a year.
What we offer
- Competitive wages determined by market research
- Uncapped profit share program
- Health, dental and vision benefits
- 3 weeks vacation to start
- Paid holiday shutdown in December
- 12 paid Care Days per year
- Yearly Continuous Improvement allowance
- A results-driven company with a compassionate culture
- Opportunity to work on game projects that are enjoyed by millions of players worldwide!
- Ability to make a difference. Have an idea? Talk directly with leadership about it instead of running through layers of bureaucracy
About Kano
Since inception, Kano has released twelve gaming titles (seven of which are live serviced today), with over 35 million downloads and close to $100M in sales.
Bootstrapped in 2008, and achieving profitability in 2009, Kano continues to grow its team, game portfolio and player base as an independent gaming studio, with hit games like Mob Wars, Idle Distiller and Monster Country.
Canadian owned and full-remote, we believe in giving small teams of talented people challenging problems and getting out of their way. That’s why we look for the best and brightest to join our team; people who have talent, vision, and commitment.
Check out this article If you'd like to get some insight into our hiring process, our employee manual to understand how and why we do things the way we do, and this fun little video for an intro to the team!
*Kano is an equal opportunity employer and considers qualified applicants without regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, national origin, age, disability, medical condition, religion, marital status or veteran status, or any other basis protected by law*
