{"id":141705,"url":"https://alion.io/job/createfuture-principal-engineer-igaming-net","title":"Principal Engineer - iGaming & .NET","company":{"id":52267,"name":"CreateFuture","domain":"createfuture.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/createfuture","size_band":"501-1000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":96,"open_postings":6,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.167,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":40,"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"}},"role":"Games","role_family":"Games","seniority":"lead","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Edinburgh, United Kingdom","London, United Kingdom","Manchester, United Kingdom","Leeds, United Kingdom"],"countries":["GB"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":56000,"max_usd":165000,"period":"year","method":"global_role_cell_scaled_by_country","sample_n":39},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Claude","optional":false},{"name":"Claude Code","optional":false},{"name":"Context Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"Embeddings","optional":false},{"name":"Node JS","optional":false},{"name":"Structured Outputs","optional":false},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-07-31T12:59:45Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-06","last_verified_at":"2026-10-18T00:22:38Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":78,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":1,"flags":[],"days_open":77},"description":"CreateFuture is fast becoming the UK's most recognisable digital consultancy, with years of experience building digital products and services for major organisations whilst putting our people first. We have offices in the centre of Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester and London as well as remote employees located throughout the country.\nWe are a team of creators - whether that's code, project plans, go to market strategies, culture initiatives, marketing campaigns, large language models or people policies. And together, with our clients, we create the future. This has seen us collaborate and partner across a multitude of industries and sectors, with the likes of PayPal, Adidas, NatWest, FanDuel and Money Saving Expert to name just a few.\nOur reputation as a partner determined to deliver high-quality, robust and thoughtful products has enabled us to scale to over 500 people in the last couple of years, and it is our amazing people - along with the safe, supportive and friendly culture we have built - that makes CreateFuture a great place to work. Don't just take our word for it though, we have been recognised by Best Workplaces UK multiple years in a row - across a number of categories - and our employee exit rate is astonishingly low.\nJoin us on our journey… Let's create something awesome, together, today.\nAbout this role\nThe bar has moved. Five years ago a strong engineer was measured by what they could build and how well they could mentor others to build it. Today, with Claude Code and agents, we produce quality work at a speed that would have looked superhuman in 2022.\nWhat separates exceptional from good is no longer typing speed or local craftsmanship. It is the complete package: architecture, deep engineering foundations, communication, system thinking, and the judgement to direct both your own intelligence and AI toward outcomes that matter.\nExceptional people at this level are not the best implementer in the room; they are the person whose specifications, decisions, and review judgement compound into systems that work in production and that others (and agents) can build on. They are a force multiplier, they hold a room at the highest levels, and clients treat them as the SME by default.\nThis particular Principal seat sits on one of our largest iGaming engagements: sportsbook, casino and gaming platforms for a major client. You oversee a group of engineers and Tech Leads, line managing the leads, and you are the single named owner of what that group delivers: you size the work, shape the teams, and take the call. You lead by steering - reviewing the approach early, keeping the bar consistent across teams, and coaching leads to make the call themselves - and you stay close enough to the code that your authority with engineers comes from being one.\nYour mindset\nThe mindset is the engine, and it is almost impossible to teach retrospectively. You are outcome obsessed, not output obsessed and you care whether the problem was actually solved - you resist the ego instinct to admire a clever solution and ask whether it was needed at all.\nYou are intellectually honest about uncertainty, taking a trust-but-verify approach and assuming the surprising bug is the one that will burn. You are deeply pragmatic, which matters at CreateFuture where pace counts: you have outgrown the religious wars about platforms, languages and patterns, you hold opinions loosely, and you decide for the systems in front of you, not the ones you wish you had.\nYou have a bias toward delivery: the smallest thing that works, then iterate, treating documents and meetings as means to that end.\nAnd you are relentlessly curious beyond any immediate need, wanting to know how the database actually stores things or why a Claude Opus inference call costs what it does, which keeps you several layers ahead while the rest of the team is still reading the API docs.\nAI as the accelerant\nFor a Principal to be truly exceptional, this is now already a first-class competency in your arsenal, not a side skill. An engineer who is brilliant by last year's standards but not fluent with AI is not exceptional in 2026. In practice that means:\nSetting AI up to succeed. You treat context engineering as a craft (the right files, specs, examples and constraints), and you architect systems with clean interfaces, good naming, machine-readable specs and knowledge bases so the codebase is a quality baseline AI can work on later. No separate ivory-tower architect required.\nReviewing and choosing well. You read far more code than you write, and your value is in the quality of review: catching the silent assumption, the security flaw, the architectural drift, knowing where models fail and looking there first. You pick the right tool for the job (Claude Code for a deep refactor, an inline assistant when that is enough, a sub-agent for parallel work, the right model for analysis versus generation)\nWorking with non-determinism. You see where AI moves the bottleneck and helps people left and right of you unblock the value stream. You build with AI components but know success is no longer a binary, reaching for evals, golden datasets, structured outputs and fallback paths as naturally as you reach for unit tests.\nTechnical breadth across the full stack\nExceptional means depth in at least one area but competence everywhere the system reaches.\nBackend: an instinct for distributed systems (what fails, what is eventually consistent, where queues back up), APIs that age well, thoughtful data modelling, and an understanding that languages are mostly syntax differences you can close with AI.\nCloud: cost-aware and security-aware by default, reaching for IaC, composing the primitives rather than stitching together managed services and hoping it works.\nData: modern pipelines, governance and lineage, increasingly vector stores and embeddings, with data quality treated as seriously as production code because garbage in, garbage out is far worse once AI features depend on it.\nWeb and mobile: past the framework arguments, with a clear view on what you would pick today, and able to build \"good enough\" front ends yourself with AI.\nFull-stack here means seeing the platform as one system and knowing which levers matter most. It does not mean front-end work with a few Node.js servers.\nThe domain: iGaming\nDepth in the domain is what lets you hold the room with the people who have run it for years.\nThe mechanics: odds and pricing, third-party feed and provider integrations, the bet lifecycle from placement to settlement, wallets, bonusing and promotions.\nRegulated markets: multi-jurisdiction compliance, responsible gambling, KYC, and the operational reality of running products under licence.\nLive-sport scale: high concurrency, real-time data, and the traffic spikes that come with big sporting moments.\nYou will not need every corner of this on day one, but you know enough of it to be credible with the directors who own it.\nSystem thinking, consulting and commercial judgement\nAt CreateFuture we work in a consultancy context, where many otherwise excellent IC engineers can struggle.\nYou know technology is roughly 30% of the picture; the rest is design, argument and reasoning, commercial and political acumen, and the clarity to frame outcomes for a COO, CTO, CIO or CEO in their own language.\nYou know when gold-plating is wasteful, you can name when a project's real problem is not technical and say so even when it is awkward, and you have a strong sense of what is durable versus what is fashion.\nYou are not the engineer who introduced the team to seven new technologies last year; you are the one who removed three and quietly made the remaining stack stronger.\nLeadership mentality\nTechnical work is necessary but no longer sufficient. By default you raise the level of everyone around you, regardless of discipline.\nLead the leads. You coach Tech Leads to own their team's scope, drive the dates and spot risk early, and you develop the people who could take your seat next.\nDive into the product. You learn its users and its pain points, and point teams at what is valuable to the business, not just what is asked for.\nCommunicate clearly and frequently (documents, decisions, post-mortems, design notes); the written artefact is the machine-readable context we can feed to AI later.\nMake decisions and own them. You don't escalate everything or hoard control, and you are willing to be the benevolent dictator when it is your turn.\nMentor in AI fluency, not just code: tooling, prompting and review discipline, so your team is twice as productive a year from now.\nNeed little line management. You communicate upwards, raise by exception, self-resolve, and can be trusted with financial controls.\nDisagree well. You tell people they are wrong with evidence and no ego, and you change your own mind when you are shown to be wrong.\nWhat we're not looking for\nThe gifted engineer who sits in a silo. This is a team game.\nThe one who is fluent with AI but ships without the guardrails and quality gates enterprise clients expect.\nThe one with strong technical opinions who cannot justify them commercially and gets defensive when challenged.\nThe pure manager who wants to orchestrate teams rather than get involved. This is about setting a new standard, not coordinating it.\nThe engineer who will not immerse in a client environment. This role will mean on-site work and trusted relationships built in person. We are not going back to working away from the client and being bypassed.\nWhat we’ll offer you:\nWe trust people to do their best work. That means flexibility over rigid rules, impact over activity, and real investment in your growth both professionally and personally. You’ll be part of a supportive, and friendly culture, surrounded by smart, curious people who care deeply about what they do.\nWe offer flexible working, including hybrid and remote options. Our office hubs are located in Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, London and Bulgaria, with occasional travel to client sites or CreateFuture offices when needed.\nWe trust you to manage your time balancing collaboration with client time and focused work. What matters is the impact you have, not how busy you look.\nOur hiring process\nWe try to keep our hiring process clear, fair and respectful of your time. We aim to get back to everyone who applies and we will be upfront about where you are in the process.\nIt usually looks like this:\nCall with our Talent Acquisition Team \nRole specific capability interview \nDepending on the role, we might also ask you to do a short presentation, a practical or technical task or have a values focused conversation. We will explain what is involved before anything happens.\nInclusion at CreateFuture \nWe believe diverse teams build better workplaces and better products. We want CreateFuture to be a place where people feel able to be themselves and do their best work.\nIf you need any adjustments or support during the application process, just. We will do what we can to help.\nWe look forward to your application!","description_format":"text","description_chars":11059,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Flexible schedule"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["iGaming & Gambling","IT Consulting & Digital Transformation","Custom Software Development","AI Consulting & Integration"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-07-31T12:59:45Z"},{"event":"close","at":"2026-09-16T14:00:43Z"},{"event":"reopen","at":"2026-10-06T10:17:01Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":24,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.66,"p_room":0.36,"age_days":77,"expected_fill_days":40,"reasons":["conf:0","velocity","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/createfuture-principal-engineer-igaming-net","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/createfuture-principal-engineer-igaming-net.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-18T01:58:38Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":3221,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-19T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":52267},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=52267"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fcreatefuture-principal-engineer-igaming-net"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fcreatefuture-principal-engineer-igaming-net"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fcreatefuture-principal-engineer-igaming-net"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/createfuture-principal-engineer-igaming-net\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fcreatefuture-principal-engineer-igaming-net"}]}