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Redwood City, California, United States
Onsite
At Bellota Labs, we’re building the next generation of interactive gaming experiences. Our newest product, WPTHome, is redefining how players engage with the World Poker Tour by creating a connected, engaging platform that brings the excitement and community of poker beyond the table. As a fast-growing startup backed by the World Poker Tour, we’re driven by innovation, world-class product development, and a passion for delivering exceptional player experiences.
We’re looking for a Senior/Principal Software Engineer to join our team and play a key role in shaping the architecture, design, and development of WPTHome. You’ll work alongside a talented engineering organization to build scalable systems, solve complex technical challenges, and help define the future of our platform. If you’re excited by the opportunity to build a product from the ground up and make a meaningful impact in a high-growth environment, we’d love to meet you.
Real product, real stakes, real players. ClubWPT Gold is a live, real-money (sweepstakes) poker + casino platform under the WPT brand — not a prototype. Your code ships to players multi-tabling for real prizes.
Genuinely hard engineering. Real-time table state, multi-tabling performance, client perf budgets across desktop (Electron) and mobile, provably-fair gameplay, and an event pipeline doing live hand analytics. This is netcode and low-latency systems work, not CRUD.
Greenfield leverage. We're mid-way through decoupling our platform into clean, independently-shippable services and a new back-office — so a senior engineer has room to set patterns, not just fill tickets.
Small US team, high ownership. You'll be one of a handful of senior full-stack engineers on Home. Scope is wide, decisions are yours to make, and impact is visible from day one.
Poker DNA welcome. If you play, you'll shape a product you understand better than most engineers ever could.
Ship end-to-end features spanning the Unity/C# client and backend game services — from table UX and mini-games to the APIs and real-time state behind them.
Improve client performance and stability for multi-tabling on desktop and mobile (memory, frame budget, thermals, reconnect/resync).
Design and evolve real-time, low-latency services for gameplay: table state, matchmaking, tournament flows, wallet/ledger, and event streaming.
Partner on fairness, integrity, and anti-cheat — RNG correctness, hand-history accuracy, and the analytics pipeline that watches for anomalies.
Build for a regulated, real-money context: work cleanly alongside payments, KYC, and geo-compliance systems without letting that complexity leak into gameplay.
Raise the engineering bar: reviews, testing, observability, and on-call for the surfaces you own.
Must-haves
5+ years building and shipping production software; senior-level ownership of non-trivial systems.
Real full-stack range: strong in a client stack and in backend services (you don't need both to be Unity/C#, but you must be able to go deep on the client and the server).
Hands-on with C# and/or Unity, or a track record that makes picking them up fast credible (strong C++/game-client, graphics, or real-time systems background).
Experience with real-time / low-latency or high-concurrency systems (multiplayer netcode, streaming, matchmaking, trading, or similar).
Comfort operating what you build: testing, observability, incident response.
Nice-to-haves
Domain: poker, casino, social-casino, or real-money / iGaming / sweepstakes experience.
Live-ops / games-as-a-service: shipping to a live audience with feature flags, staged rollouts, and A/B testing.
Client depth: Unity performance profiling, memory/thermal optimization, or Electron desktop packaging.
Real-time systems: multiplayer netcode, matchmaking, or state sync at scale.
Data / eventing: Kafka / Kinesis pipelines; hand-history, telemetry, or analytics work.
Infra / CD: Kubernetes, ArgoCD, Jenkins.
Regulated domain: payments (PSP routing), KYC, geo-compliance, or fraud/integrity systems.
You're a poker player.