Staff Data Engineer (Big Data)

TL;DR

Staff Data Engineer (Gaming): Leading the design and evolution of large-scale streaming and batch data platforms with an accent on technical leadership, architectural direction, and end-to-end system ownership. Focus on defining robust streaming and event-driven architectures, optimizing high-performance data pipelines, and ensuring data reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency for mission-critical data products.

Location: Hybrid in San Mateo, CA, USA. This role is eligible for SIE’s top-tier benefits package that includes medical, dental, vision, matching 401(k), paid time off, and wellness program, indicating a US-based employment. Teams are split between London and California, requiring collaboration across time zones and occasional travel.

Salary: $216,200—$324,400 USD

Company

Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) is a corporation focused on understanding and improving the customer experience for PlayStation users globally, leveraging data to inform key business decisions.

What you will do

• Lead the design and evolution of large-scale batch and real-time data platforms using Apache Spark, Flink, and Databricks.
• Define streaming and event-driven architectures, setting standards for data reliability, scalability, observability, and cost efficiency.
• Build and maintain high-performance data pipelines in Scala and Python for both batch and streaming workloads.
• Drive best practices for CI/CD, automated testing, deployment, monitoring, alerting, and SLAs for data systems.
• Collaborate with product managers, analytics, ML, and backend teams to translate business requirements into scalable data solutions.
• Mentor senior and mid-level data engineers and influence data engineering strategy across multiple teams or domains.

Requirements

• 10-12+ years of hands-on experience building and operating large-scale data pipelines and platforms.
• 3-5+ years in a technical leadership or staff-level role, with design ownership, mentoring, and architecture decisions.
• Deep hands-on expertise with Scala, Python, Spark, Flink, and Databricks, applied to production systems at SIE scale.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems design and expertise in data modeling for analytics and operational use cases.
• Extensive experience with AWS services (EKS, S3, EC2, Kinesis, DynamoDB, Glue, Deequ) and SQL with various database technologies (Snowflake, Teradata, Oracle).
• Ability to independently design complex, ambiguous systems with long-term sustainability in mind, demonstrating end-to-end ownership.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid working policy based out of San Mateo, CA offices.
• Top-tier benefits package including medical, dental, vision, matching 401(k), paid time off, and a wellness program.
• Coveted employee discounts for Sony products.
• Opportunity to work in a global and multi-cultural environment with team members located in multiple geographies.
• Committed to using data to understand and improve customer experience for over 150 million PlayStation users.