Senior Principal Engineer, Data & Machine Learning

Location: San Mateo, California, United States

Base salary: $304,200–$456,200 USD annually

Company

hirify.global develops the PlayStation brand, hardware, network services, and entertainment experiences serving more than 100 million people.

What you will do

• Translate the multi-year Data & Intelligence strategy into a technical strategy and target architecture for trusted data products, ML systems, shared intelligence, evaluation, activation, and lifecycle management.
• Chair the architecture review forum, publish decisions, track adoption, and enforce standards across engineering organizations.
• Define reusable platform and domain boundaries, data contracts, golden paths, model evaluation, experimentation, observability, reliability, cost, and lifecycle standards.
• Lead complex cross-organizational initiatives through architecture proposals, reference designs, prototypes, and production-ready capabilities.
• Partner with engineering, data science, security, privacy, legal, governance, and responsible-AI teams to embed controls across the data and ML lifecycle.
• Advise executives on technical investments and risks, measure adoption and outcomes, rationalize duplicated capabilities, and mentor senior technical professionals.

Requirements

• 15+ years of experience in software, data, or machine learning engineering, including 9+ years leading the architecture and delivery of large-scale, complex systems.
• Track record of authoring architectures, standards, or platforms adopted across multiple organizations and kept in use.
• Experience taking data, ML, or decisioning systems serving tens of millions of consumers into production and operating them at scale.
• Experience chairing or serving as the deciding technical voice in an architecture review forum spanning multiple engineering organizations.
• Deep expertise in at least two of the following: reusable data products, semantic and metadata layers, data contracts, ML platforms, lifecycle management, evaluation and decisioning, real-time signals, distributed inference, activation platforms, experimentation, causal measurement, generative AI, retrieval, agentic systems, responsible AI, privacy, and technical governance.
• Strong command of distributed systems, cloud, data architecture, APIs, security, reliability, observability, and performance engineering.
• Ability to influence senior executives, engineering and product leaders, and cross-functional partners without direct authority.
• Outstanding written communication and experience leading through documents.
• Experience mentoring Staff, Principal, or similarly senior technical professionals.
• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent experience.

Nice to have

• Data and ML experience in gaming, entertainment, media, digital commerce, or another large-scale consumer ecosystem.
• Experience with personalization, recommendations, customer intelligence, content intelligence, experimentation, or predictive decisioning at scale.
• Experience with shared data or ML platforms serving multiple products and organizational domains.
• Experience with feature, vector, graph, semantic, or knowledge platforms, AI gateways, and LLMOps.
• Experience translating research or emerging technology into production capabilities.
• Contributions through open source, patents, publications, standards, or conference talks.

Culture & Benefits

• Senior individual-contributor role with no direct reports and broad architectural influence.
• Direct reporting to the Vice President and participation in the organization’s leadership team.
• Opportunity to set technical direction for data and intelligence across PlayStation and build reusable capabilities for experiences reaching more than 100 million people.
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage, matching 401(k), paid time off, wellness program, and Sony product discounts.
• Potential eligibility for a bonus package.

Hiring process

• Background checks are conducted at the offer stage and may include criminal background checks for some roles.