Staff Data Engineer

Why PlayStation

PlayStation isnt just the Best Place to Play its also the Best Place to Work. Today were recognized as a global leader in entertainment producing The PlayStation family of products and services including PlayStation5 PlayStation4 PlayStationVR PlayStationPlus 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.

Staff Data Engineer (ICDS)

San Mateo CA

PlayStation is for The Players.

With over 150 million customers in 109 countries Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) is committed to using data to understand The Players: our customers better than anyone else. Using the amazing networked power of PlayStation5 and our other PlayStation systems we learn how they use them for gaming and also how they use the networked services like streamed games music video and how they pay and how we can improve their customer experience. We work with game developers marketing R&D PlayStationStore and many other parts of Sony to constantly improve our customer experience and maximize our business potential.

The ICDS DE team has grown rapidly over recent years in response to an increasing need for the business to leverage data to inform and shape key decisions and to identify new opportunities. Currently there are approximately 170 staff within the ICDS DE team split between London and California made up of high-quality data professionals covering architecture and platform support data processing and technical program management

Due to team expansion ICDS DE is looking to recruit talented highly driven individuals who have excelled in previous roles and are looking for a new challenge in a dynamic and rewarding environment.

ICDS delivers data that powers Analytics Data sciences Marketing ML and multiple other teams across the companies and offices that make up the PlayStation business: high quality valuable to the user accessible and continuously improving.

ICDS Staff Data Engineer

We are looking for a Staff Data Engineer to join the ICDS Player DE team within the Sony PlayStation environment.

A Staff Data Engineer is required to own and evolve large-scale streaming and batch data platforms providing technical leadership and architectural direction across the data ecosystem.

Based in our San Mateo offices the team provides data services for various global business units associated with Sony PlayStation.

Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Lead the design and evolution oflarge-scale batch and real-time data platforms using Apache Spark Flink and Databricks
• Define streaming and event-driven architectures (low-latency exactly-once high-throughput) using Flink and Scala
• Set architectural standards for data reliability scalability observability and cost efficiency
• Own end-to-end system design for mission-critical data products from ingestion to consumption

Data Pipeline Development

• Build and maintainhigh-performance data pipelines in Scala and Python for both batch and streaming workloads
• Developreal-time processing jobs (windowing stateful processing joins) using Flink
• Optimize Spark jobs for performance cost and data correctness on Databricks
• Implement robust data quality checks schema evolution and fault tolerance

Platform & Operations Excellence

• Drive best practices forCI/CD automated testing and deployment of data pipelines
• Establishmonitoring alerting and SLAs for data systems
• Lead efforts incapacity planning performance tuning and cost optimization
• Partner with SRE / Platform teams on reliability scaling and incident response
• Ensure code is fully scalable maintainable and performant

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work closely with product managers analytics ML and backend teams to translate business requirements into scalable data solutions
• Enable downstream use cases includinganalytics reporting experimentation and machine learning
• Influence data modeling and contract design to ensure long-term platform sustainability
• Work proactively to address project requirements and articulate issues and challenges with enough lead time to address project delivery risk
• Requires the ability to work in a global and multi-cultural environment. Team members are in multiple geographies resulting in time constraints due to time zones differences and a requirement for occasional travel

Mentorship & Influence

• Mentor senior and mid-level data engineers; raise the technical bar across the organization
• Lead technical reviews design discussions and post-incident analyses
• Influence data engineering strategy across multiple teams or domains
• Act as ago-to expert for streaming systems Spark optimization and distributed data processing

Governance Security & Compliance

• Ensure data platforms adhere to security privacy and compliance requirements
• Define best practices fordata access control lineage and auditing
• Drive standardization around data formats schemas and lifecycle management

Experience

• BS Degree in Engineering or Masters Computer Science or equivalent experience
• 3-5 years in a technical leadership or staff-level role (design ownership mentoring architecture decisions)
• 10-12 years of hands-on experience building and operating large-scale data pipelines and platforms
• 10-12 years of relevant industry experience including ownership of complex high-impact data systems used at scale
• 10-12 years of experience in database development programming (ScalaPython) design and analysis
• 10-12 years of experience with distributed framework like Spark Flink
• 5-7 years of experience with streaming services Flink Kafka
• 10-12 years of experience with data and ETL programming (Databricks Ab Initio)
• 7-10 years of experience with AWS services (EKS S3 EC2 Kinesis DynamoDB Glue Deequ etc)
• 7-10 years of experience in SQL and a variety of database technologies Snowflake Teradata and Oracle.
• Experience in designing and architecting medium to complex systems well versed with design standards & framework
• Expertise indata modeling for analytics and operational use cases
• Experience withdata lakes / lakehouse architectures (e.g. Delta Lake)
• Strong understanding ofschema evolution data versioning and data governance
• Experience with automation configuration management orchestration enterprise schedulers

Skills Required (essential):

• Recognized as a technical authority in data engineering within one or more domains (batch streaming lakehouse analytics platforms)
• Deep hands-on expertise withScala Python Spark Flink and Databricks applied to production systems at SIE scale
• Strong understanding ofdistributed systems design trade-offs and failure modes
• Ability to independently designcomplex ambiguous systems with long-term sustainability in mind
• Demonstratesend-to-end ownership of critical data platforms or services from design through production operations
• Drives engineering best practices forreliability performance cost efficiency and data correctness
• Anticipates risks and proactively addresses scalability operational and data quality concerns
• Holds ahigh operational bar ensuring systems meet SLAs and business expectations
• Leads or significantly influencesarchitecture and design decisions across teams or programs
• Sets technical direction and standards fordata platforms pipelines and tooling
• Evaluates and introduces new technologies when they provide clear business or platform value
• Ensures architectural decisions align withSIE platform security and compliance standards
• Works effectively acrossmultiple teams disciplines and organizations (product analytics ML platform finance)
• Translates business and product strategy into scalable data solutions that enablerevenue engagement and operational insights
• Acts as a trusted technical partner for stakeholders beyond the immediate team
• Mentors senior and mid-level engineers; raises the overall technical bar
• Leads design reviews technical forums and incident postmortems
• Influences outcomes throughtechnical credibility data-driven decision-making and clear communication
• Models SIE engineering values and best practices
• Establishes standards formonitoring alerting observability and on-call readiness
• Drives improvements inCI/CD automation and developer productivity for data engineering
• Champions cost-awareness and efficiency across data platforms

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