Principal Software Engineer (Xbox Media)

Location: Hybrid; home office in San Francisco, California, United States

Base pay: $171,100.00–$316,576.00 annually in the U.S.; incentive compensation may also apply but is not guaranteed.

Company

Xbox Media, backed by Xbox and Microsoft, builds player-first monetization technology for advertising across Xbox surfaces and ad-supported gameplay.

What you will do

• Own engineering outcomes for organization-critical systems, platforms, and technical domains, connecting engineering work to business priorities and product direction.
• Define and drive long-term technical direction across architecture, reliability, cost, security, delivery velocity, and organizational adoption.
• Align engineering leadership, product leadership, and adjacent organizations around technical direction and major platform evolution.
• Create mechanisms, systems, practices, and frameworks that improve delivery, reliability, learning, and engineering leverage across multiple teams.
• Guide sequencing and risk management for high-impact technical initiatives.
• Develop Staff-level engineers and emerging technical leaders through mentorship, design reviews, and engineering standards.

Requirements

• BA/BS degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, plus 11+ years of relevant professional experience and 15+ years total experience.
• Significant software engineering experience, including designing and operating large-scale, high-reliability distributed systems.
• Experience setting technical direction for a broad domain and driving it to measurable outcomes.
• Strong backend engineering depth in service architecture, APIs, data modeling, reliability engineering, and production operations at scale.
• Experience making high-stakes architecture decisions with company-wide or multi-team consequences and building alignment to execute them.
• Ability to evaluate and clearly communicate trade-offs across scalability, reliability, cost, security, delivery velocity, and organizational adoption.
• Proven experience developing senior engineers and emerging technical leaders, with visible impact on organizational technical capability.
• Strong working knowledge of Go, GCP, Cloud Run or GKE, and distributed data systems, with experience operating systems at significant scale.
• Excellent written and verbal communication for design documents, executive forums, and one-to-one engineering conversations.

Culture & Benefits

• Experimental, learning-oriented, collaborative, and inclusive engineering environment.
• Medical, dental, vision, healthcare spending, life, disability, and related insurance programs, subject to eligibility.
• 401(k) with company match, tuition reimbursement, and charitable donation matching.
• Paid holidays, vacation, sick time, floating holidays, bereavement, compassion, and parental leave.
• Mental health and wellbeing programs, fitness programs, free and discounted games, and other voluntary benefits.
• Relocation assistance may be available if the company requires a geographic move for the job.