Principal Engineer
The Rank Group3 days ago
Cape Town, South AfricaStaff+
Responsibilities
- Design, build, operate, and lifecycle-manage AI engineering harnesses including agent scaffolding, repository and domain context layers, prompt and workflow libraries, evaluation harnesses, regression suites, guardrails, and developer-toolchain integrations.
- Drive technical AI adoption through reference implementations, stack-specific integration patterns, developer enablement, and removal of adoption obstacles across delivery teams.
- Own domain context and technical adjudication for areas including player journeys, accounts and wallets, payments, promotions, game integration, responsible gambling, and regulatory reporting.
- Define and maintain engineering standards for AI-assisted development, including code provenance, review obligations, licensing and IP hygiene, secure coding, and definitions of done.
- Build engineering telemetry and measurement pipelines that provide credible delivery, quality, and flow evidence to leadership.
- Evaluate AI platforms, models, tooling, and third-party services for capability, security, data handling, cost, and exit risk.
- Provide technical leadership without line authority through mentoring, architecture and design reviews, prototyping, and technical risk reduction.
Requirements
- 10+ years of software engineering experience with sustained hands-on delivery at senior or staff-plus level.
- Deep production expertise in at least two of Java, .NET, React, and Flutter, with working command of the remaining technologies.
- Demonstrated depth in cloud-native architecture, AWS, microservices, event-driven systems, API design, and CI/CD engineering.
- Practical experience with LLM application patterns, agentic workflows, tool use, retrieval and context engineering, prompt and workflow design, model evaluation, benchmarking, and generative-system safety.
- Experience building developer-facing platforms, internal tooling, or platform systems used across an engineering organization.
- Practical, shipped experience applying AI or machine learning to engineering workflows, beyond evaluation or advisory work.
- Evidence of technical leadership across multiple teams without line-management authority.
- Ability to acquire deep domain understanding and make sound technical decisions in regulated, high-transaction-volume consumer environments.
- Strong communication and influence skills, including explaining technical trade-offs to senior technical and commercial stakeholders.
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Engineering, or a related field.
- Experience in online gaming, betting, financial services, or another regulated consumer domain is strongly preferred.
- Experience with delivery accountability in regulated, consumer-facing, high-availability environments is advantageous.
Benefits
- Hybrid working and colleague support networks, including menopause support and weekly PepTalks.
- Development opportunities, leadership training, and industry certifications.
- International exposure and collaboration with colleagues across the global business.
- Pension, bonus schemes, private medical insurance, and life insurance, varying by brand and location.
Categories
About The Rank Group
The Rank Group plc runs Grosvenor Casinos, Mecca Bingo, and Enracha venues and operates online gaming through Rank Interactive, serving players in the UK and Spain. Its business model spans retail casinos and bingo clubs plus regulated digital casino, bingo, and sportsbook products. Founded in 1937 and headquartered in Maidenhead, it is listed on the London Stock Exchange and operates more than 100 licensed venues.