Principal Gameplay Programmer Jobs in Chicago, IL

Welcome to the world of land-based gaming. At Light & Wonder, it's all about the games, and our Gaming team builds cutting-edge technology, products, and content for the most iconic casinos and operators across the globe.

The Principal Software Architect is responsible for defining and driving the technical architecture strategy that enables Light & Wonder's transition from legacy gaming technology stacks to the next-generation Carbon platform. This role serves as a critical technical leader across multiple business units, helping align engineering standards, development frameworks, tooling, and platform capabilities to support scalable, modern game development across the enterprise.

You'll partner closely with studio engineering teams, platform engineering, product management, compliance, and executive leadership to establish architectural direction, guide modernization efforts, and reduce fragmentation across technologies and workflows. This role requires both strategic thinking and hands-on technical depth, balancing long-term platform vision with practical execution in a highly regulated gaming environment.

Essential Job Functions

Enterprise Architecture & Technology Strategy

• Define and drive architectural strategy supporting the migration from legacy game technology stacks to the Carbon platform.

• Establish enterprise-wide engineering standards, architectural patterns, and development best practices across multiple studios and business units.

• Partner with studio and platform leaders to align technologies, tooling, and workflows while preserving studio agility and innovation.

• Evaluate and guide strategic technology decisions, including framework adoption, engine strategy, and modernization initiatives.

• Lead architectural reviews and technical design sessions across game platform and development initiatives.

• Drive standardization efforts around shared frameworks, SDKs, CI/CD pipelines, telemetry, deployment, and development tooling.

• Make effective build-vs-buy recommendations considering scalability, maintainability, cost, time-to-market, and long-term platform strategy.

• Stay current with emerging technologies, software architecture patterns, and game engine trends relevant to modern game development.

Technical Leadership & Solution Design

• Design scalable, maintainable, and performant software architectures supporting enterprise game development ecosystems.

• Provide architectural guidance for game engine technologies, including Unity, Godot, proprietary engines, and supporting toolchains.

• Develop architectural blueprints and technical roadmaps that enable modernization and long-term platform evolution.

• Ensure systems meet enterprise standards for performance, reliability, security, and regulatory compliance.

• Partner with development teams to resolve complex technical challenges and remove architectural bottlenecks.

• Guide integration efforts between shared platform technologies and studio-specific game implementations.

• Support adoption of modern engineering practices including automated testing, DevOps, CI/CD, observability, and cloud-enabled workflows.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Collaborate with product, compliance, infrastructure, QA, and studio engineering teams to align technical solutions with business objectives.

• Influence technical direction across teams without direct authority through strong communication, credibility, and collaboration.

• Communicate complex architectural concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Balance innovation, platform consistency, studio autonomy, and regulatory requirements in architectural decision-making.

• Act as a trusted advisor to leadership regarding technical risks, modernization opportunities, and platform investments.

• Governance, Risk & Compliance

• Ensure gaming platform architectures comply with regulatory, security, and operational requirements across global gaming markets.

• Remain engaged with enterprise architecture and security groups to align with evolving standards and compliance requirements.

• Identify technical risks early and guide mitigation strategies to ensure long-term platform stability and scalability.

• Promote maintainable, supportable, and operationally efficient solutions across the organization.

• The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in game development technologies, modern software architecture, and cross-functional technical leadership.

• Experience with game engines and frameworks such as Unity, Godot, and custom engine technologies is highly desired.

Education:Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field or equivalent work experience required.

Physical Requirements:The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to sit, stand, walk, bend, use hands, operate a computer, and have specific vision abilities to include close and distance vision, and ability to adjust focus working with computer and business equipment.

Work Conditions: The work conditions are representative and typical of similar jobs in comparable organizations.

Our studio is located in Las Vegas, NV. This role requires presence on-site 4 days a week.

We're open to candidates based in Chicago, IL but prefer candidates to be based out of Las Vegas.

Light & Wonder and its affiliates (collectively, L&W) are engaged in highly regulated gaming businesses. As a result, certain L&W employees may, among other things, be required to obtain a gaming or other license(s), undergo background investigations or security checks, or meet certain standards dictated by law, regulation or contracts.

In order to ensure L&W complies with its regulatory and contractual commitments, as a condition to hiring and continuing to employ its employees, L&W requires all of its employees to meet those requirements that are necessary to fulfill their individual roles. As a prerequisite to employment with L&W (to the extent permitted by law), you shall be asked to consent to L&W conducting a due diligence/background investigation on you.

This job description should not be interpreted as all-inclusive; it is intended to identify major responsibilities and requirements of the job. The employee in this position may be requested to perform other job-related tasks and responsibilities than those stated above.

Light & Wonder is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate against applicants due to race, color, sex, age, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, status as a veteran, and basis of disability or any other federal, state or local protected class. If you'd like more information about your equal employment opportunity rights as an applicant under the law, please click here for EEOC Poster.