Staff Software Engineer

About Sony Interactive Entertainment

Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) is a vibrant technology-driven company known for delivering innovative network and hardware solutions under the renowned PlayStation brand. As a subsidiary of Sony Group Corporation, SIE supports over 100 million users globally and owns some of the most esteemed intellectual properties in entertainment.

Role Overview

We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to guide and develop the upcoming generation of network automation platforms. Our global network infrastructure is vast, operating across more than 40 interconnection points and over 20 data centers worldwide. Transitioning from specialist-led workflows to dependable, declarative software platforms is crucial to safely and efficiently manage this scale.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead technical and architectural direction for network automation and infrastructure control systems, acting as product owners of the self-service network API, collaborating with stakeholders to define behavior and reliability expectations.
• Apply domain-driven design alongside networking experts and software teams to create shared understanding and convert these into versioned, testable contracts.
• Develop APIs, controllers, and services that manage live production infrastructure with safety and scalability in mind.
• Implement Kubernetes-based solutions including custom resources and control loops to ensure convergence towards declared system states.
• Manage Kubernetes operational aspects such as CRD deployment, role-based access controls, controller health, Helm packaging, drift analysis, and incident troubleshooting.
• Design distributed workflows ensuring correct operation under eventual consistency, at-least-once message delivery, handling concurrency, partial failures, idempotency, and recoverability.
• Create stable APIs and data models for cross-team consumption, focusing on versioning and backward compatibility.
• Develop multi-tenant infrastructure platform patterns emphasizing tenant isolation, authorization, policy enforcement, and automation safety boundaries.
• Implement robust testing, monitoring, and change management processes for live infrastructure software.
• Enhance software delivery pipelines with automated continuous integration gates, version control, controlled promotion, and safe deployment strategies.
• Lead modernization and migration of legacy systems, ensuring backward compatibility and smooth transitions.
• Facilitate cross-team technical alignment, participate in organizational decision-making, and mentor engineers to uplift standards company-wide.

Required Qualifications

• Proven expertise in backend programming languages such as Python, Go, Rust, or Java covering asynchronous programming, static typing, API creation, packaging, and tool development.
• Substantial experience developing Kubernetes controllers or operators with custom resource definitions and reconciliation patterns.
• Extensive background building event-driven distributed systems addressing challenges like eventual consistency, idempotency, concurrent data handling, and fault tolerance.
• Demonstrated ability designing and implementing self-service, multi-tenant platforms with strong access control and isolation mechanisms.
• Advanced skills in API and schema design, including managing versioning and compatibility for interfaces used by diverse teams.
• Leadership experience influencing cross-team architecture and mentoring engineers through complex technical endeavors.
• Strong track record delivering large-scale infrastructure management systems from conception to reliable production deployment, especially involving network, cloud, or compute resources.

Preferred Skills

• Foundational knowledge of networking concepts, including BGP, IP fabrics, VXLAN/EVPN/L3VPN.
• Proficiency in Go sufficient to collaborate on related services and controllers.
• Experience devising testing and observability frameworks for production-grade infrastructure automation, particularly for systems challenging to replicate in continuous integration environments.
• Familiarity with graph databases or source-of-truth systems modeling infrastructure and relationships.

Additional Information

This role offers a unique opportunity to influence the architecture and engineering standards for next-generation network automation platforms, transitioning from individual scripts to comprehensive, model-driven software systems. The Staff Engineer's impact extends beyond individual contributions to shaping reusable engineering paradigms and mentoring the engineering community.

Sony Interactive Entertainment conducts background checks during the offer phase, including potential criminal record checks. Candidate personal data will be handled in accordance with our privacy policies.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer, committed to diversity and inclusion. Employment considerations are made without discrimination based on gender identity, ethnicity, religion, disability, age, sexual orientation, or any protected status. We support fair chance employment policies.