Staff Software Engineer

Description

The company is the team behind the PlayStation brand, a subsidiary of Sony Group Corporation. It makes gaming hardware and network services used by more than 100 million people, and it owns well-known entertainment franchises.

The team is building the next generation of network automation platforms that run PlayStation Network. That network spans more than 40 interconnection locations and over 20 data centres around the world.

The aim is to move away from specialist-driven workflows and one-off automation scripts toward reliable, declarative software platforms that can be operated safely at this scale.

This is a Staff-level engineering role with strong technical influence, combining hands-on building with setting direction, defining architecture, writing designs and mentoring engineers across the team.

Your work will shape how one of the largest gaming networks in the world is operated and automated, and it will set patterns that other network domains and services can reuse.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical direction for network automation and infrastructure control platforms. Treat the self-service network API as a product: work with users and partner teams to agree outcomes and API behaviour, set clear reliability expectations, agree on ownership, and make sure those commitments are kept.
• Apply domain-driven design together with network experts, software engineers and API consumers to agree a shared vocabulary and bounded contexts, then turn those agreements into versioned, testable contracts.
• Design and build APIs, services, controllers and reconciliation workflows that manage production infrastructure safely at scale.
• Build on the Kubernetes API, including custom resources and control loops that keep actual state converging on declared intent.
• Own the operational side of Kubernetes: CRD rollout, RBAC and admission, controller health, Helm packaging, drift in deployments, and diagnosing incidents.
• Design distributed workflows that behave correctly under eventual consistency, at-least-once delivery, concurrent writes and partial failure, with idempotency and safe recovery built in from the start.
• Design stable APIs, schemas and data models used across team boundaries, including versioning and backwards compatibility.
• Develop patterns for multi-tenant infrastructure platforms covering tenant isolation, authorization, policy enforcement and safe limits on automation.
• Set strong standards for testing, observability and change safety in software that changes live infrastructure.
• Improve software delivery through automated CI gates, versioned artifacts, controlled promotion, and safe deployment and recovery strategies.
• Lead complex migrations and modernisation of existing automation, services and data models. Decide whether components should be evolved, replaced or rewritten, and make sure old and new paths coexist safely, behave compatibly, and are eventually retired.
• Align software engineering, networking, operations and architecture teams. Lead decisions within your own area, contribute to decisions owned by others, and choose technologies based on long-term value to the company and its products.
• Mentor engineers, lead technical and design reviews, and raise engineering standards across the wider organisation.

Requirements

• Deep expertise in a backend language such as Python, Go, Rust or Java, covering asynchronous concurrency, static typing, data modelling and validation, API development, and packaging and tooling.
• Strong experience building Kubernetes controllers or operators, including custom resources and reconciliation or control-loop patterns.
• Strong experience building event-driven distributed systems, especially with eventual consistency, at-least-once delivery, idempotency, optimistic concurrency and partial-failure handling.
• Experience designing and building self-service, multi-tenant platforms, including tenant isolation and policy and access control.
• Strong API and schema design skills, including versioning and schema evolution for interfaces that other teams and systems consume.
• Proven technical leadership across team boundaries: driving architectural designs, building agreement among senior technical stakeholders, and mentoring other engineers.
• A track record of taking ambiguous, technically complex problems through architecture to reliable production systems that manage large-scale infrastructure such as networks, compute or cloud resources.
• Networking fundamentals, particularly BGP, IP fabrics and VXLAN/EVPN/L3VPN.
• Working knowledge of Go, enough to understand and contribute to adjacent services and controllers.
• Experience designing testing and observability strategies for production infrastructure automation, including systems and backends that cannot be fully reproduced in CI.
• Experience with graph databases, or with source-of-truth systems that model infrastructure and its relationships.

Conditions

Background checks are carried out at the offer stage for all new employees, which may include criminal background checks for some roles, and this requires processing your personal information.