Why PlayStation?

PlayStation isn’t just the Best Place to Play — it’s also the Best Place to Work. Today, we’re recognized as a global leader in entertainment producing The PlayStation family of products and services including PlayStation®5, PlayStation®4, PlayStation®VR, PlayStation®Plus, acclaimed PlayStation software titles from PlayStation Studios, and more.

PlayStation also strives to create an inclusive environment that empowers employees and embraces diversity. We welcome and encourage everyone who has a passion and curiosity for innovation, technology, and play to explore our open positions and join our growing global team.

The PlayStation brand falls under Sony Interactive Entertainment, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sony Group Corporation.

The Principal Software Engineer role requires partnering across Product Management, Architects, Engineering, Hosting and Operations. Extensive hands-on technical expertise coupled with ingenuity, broad industry knowledge and excellent communication skills. Will use their understanding of technology, frameworks, and constraints to help pave the way for future innovation on our platforms.

You will contribute to the architecture of large-scale commerce systems on Sony’s PlayStation Network Platform. Your work will follow industry standard guidelines to enable highly available, active-active, extensible services.

Participates in product road-map discussions and identify key areas for improvement in the product and incorporates these goals into ongoing & future development initiatives.

What you'll be doing:

You are passionate about making distributed systems better and have an insatiable thirst to keep learning.
You have deep expertise in system engineering and have successfully improved the performance of the software stack.
You design and develop high-quality software solutions that meet requirements. Including code, debugging, and testing.
You have implemented rigorous standard methodologies for measuring, understanding, predicting, and improving how enterprise grade systems operate (even better if they happen to be Data oriented).
You have taken a project from scoping requirements to actual launch of project.
You know how to build a positive relationship with Architects to influence technology decisions.
You document designs, implementations and tests.
You have led a development community establishing and influencing quality engineering standard methodologies across the development community.

What we're looking for:

BS Degree in Engineering, Computer Science or equivalent experience.
10+ years’ experience in software development, programming, design, and analysis.
Expertise in programming languages and technologies including Java, Python, Golang, and infrastructure as code (Terraform, Cloud formation).
Experience delivering high performance, active-active, scalable services (Enterprise Java/J2EE, Web Services, large-scale data systems/NoSQL)
Experience with Containers (Docker and Kubernetes)
Proficient in the software development process, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations.
Track record monitoring and analyzing system performance, isolating issues or bottlenecks that could impact reliability, performance, and scalability.
Possess deep knowledge of computer science fundamentals such as object-oriented design, data structures, algorithm design, problem solving, and complexity analysis.
Identifying and mitigating technical risks.
Strong knowledge of SQL and NoSQL programming (Oracle, Cassandra, Amazon Aurora) including both relational database schema designs and schema-less systems.
Hands-on experience in Amazon Web Services, at enterprise scale is required including familiarity with DynamoDB, Aurora, EC2, and other AWS services.
Experience performing performance testing and/or development efforts for a complex, high throughput system.
Solid understanding of the path(s) customer requests flow from web browser to back-end.
Synchronous and asynchronous patterns and use cases. (REST, RPC, EDA, Eventual Consistency)
Understanding of Domain Driven Design
Understanding of loose coupling software design patterns (i.e., hexagonal architecture)
Have an opinion around microservice vs SOA.
Conduct research on new technologies and methodologies, and make recommendations for improvement.
Proven ability to take a project from scoping requirements to actual launch of project.
Work with other Principal Engineers to align technology and architecture strategies.
Extensive experience with agile development methodologies and practices involving creating tests prior to coding required.
Experience with open source technology stacks and scripting technologies required.
Ability to handle periodic on-call duty as well as out-of-band requests.
Possess outstanding verbal and written communication skills and be able to work with others at all levels, effective at working with geographically remote and culturally diverse teams.

Helpful but not required:

Game industry experience
Azure/GCP

Equal Opportunity Statement:

Sony is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All persons will receive consideration for employment without regard to gender (including gender identity, gender expression and gender reassignment), race (including colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin), religion or belief, marital or civil partnership status, disability, age, sexual orientation, pregnancy, maternity or parental status, trade union membership or membership in any other legally protected category.

We strive to create an inclusive environment, empower employees and embrace diversity. We encourage everyone to respond.

PlayStation is a Fair Chance employer and qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records will be considered for employment.

Principal Software Engineer

Job Description