Senior Software Engineer/ Software Developer (Backend)
About this role
Why Sony Interactive Entertainment?
Sony Interactive Entertainment isn’t just the Best Place to Play — it’s also the Best Place to Work. Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) is the company behind the PlayStation brand. As a subsidiary of Sony Group Corporation, we’re part of a proud legacy of innovation and excellence. SIE is a dynamic technology company, delivering cutting-edge hardware and network services to more than 100 million people and an entertainment leader, home to some of the most beloved and recognizable intellectual properties (IP) in the world. Our role at SIE is to create and nurture the experiences under the PlayStation brand, a name synonymous with entertainment excellence and creativity.
Senior Software Engineer, Backend
Waterloo, ON
Build what’s next for players.
We’re a startup inside Sony PlayStation: fast-moving, experimental, and highly ambitious, while backed by the scale, resources, and trust of Sony Interactive Entertainment.
We’re building new mobile and web experiences that help gamers connect, discover, and play together in better ways. This is a rare opportunity to build at startup speed and deliver significant impact inside one of the largest gaming companies in the world.
We are seeking a Senior Backend Software Engineer to help define the architecture, services, data models, and technical standards that power our new consumer experiences.
Responsibilities
- Define and evolve the backend architecture for highly available, scalable consumer applications across mobile and web.
- Design, build, test, deploy, and operate reliable backend services and APIs.
- Design data models and storage strategies across relational, non-relational, caching, and event-driven systems.
- Make thoughtful architectural decisions related to scalability, consistency, availability, latency, security, and cost.
- Drive performance optimization, service reliability, observability, monitoring, and incident response best practices.
- Establish coding standards, testing strategies, deployment patterns, and development practices that raise the quality bar for backend engineering.
- Partner with product managers, designers, and client engineers to translate product requirements into maintainable technical solutions.
- Mentor engineers and act as a multiplier for backend development expertise across the broader team.
- Collaborate with security, privacy, and platform teams to ensure systems meet appropriate data protection and compliance requirements.
Requirements
- 5+ years of professional software development experience building and operating backend services in production.
- BS/MS degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
- Proficiency in server-side development (Node.js with TypeScript preferred).
- Experience with relational and non-relational databases, including data modelling, indexing, transactions, and performance optimization (PostgreSQL preferred).
- Demonstrated ability to design and build GraphQL and REST APIs.
- Familiarity with caching, message queues, event streams, and asynchronous processing systems.
- Solid understanding of cloud infrastructure, containerized services, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure as code (IaC).
- Hands-on experience building and operating production systems on AWS, including compute, storage, networking, databases, and IAM.
Bonus
- A track record of building social, community, gaming, or other consumer products.
- Understanding of real-time communication systems, including messaging, presence, notifications, and activity feeds.
- Experience designing social graphs, recommendation systems, content discovery services, or personalization platforms.
- Experience with trust and safety, content moderation, abuse prevention, or user reporting systems.
- Previous experience at an early-stage startup or on a zero-to-one product team.
At SIE, we consider several factors when setting each role’s base pay range, including the competitive benchmarking data for the market and geographic location.
Please note that the base pay range may vary in line with our hybrid working policy and individual base pay will be determined based on job-related factors which may include knowledge, skills, experience, and location.
Please note, Sony Interactive Entertainment conducts background checks at the offer stage for all new employees (which may include criminal background checks for some roles) and will need to process personal information to support these checks.
Please refer to our Candidate Privacy Notice for more information about what personal information we collect, how we use it, who we share it with, and your data protection rights.
Equal Opportunity Statement:
Sony is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All persons will receive consideration for employment without regard to gender (including gender identity, gender expression and gender reassignment), race (including colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin), religion or belief, marital or civil partnership status, disability, age, sexual orientation, pregnancy, maternity or parental status, trade union membership or membership in any other legally protected category.
We strive to create an inclusive environment, empower employees and embrace diversity. We encourage everyone to respond.
Sony Interactive Entertainment is a Fair Chance employer and qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records will be considered for employment.
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