Principal Software Engineer | Xbox Media (San Francisco, CA)

Activision Blizzard, Inc. • San Francisco, CA

11d • $171,100 - $316,576 • Hybrid

About The Position

We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to empower groundbreaking mobile advertising technologies to create the next generation of our Publisher Ads Platform. We are an impactful team of problem solvers who are constantly reviewing how and why we do things and learning from each other. We are experimental, trying out new tech and ideas, and willing to do things differently to drive the entire industry forward. We are sociable and fun, and we like to hang out together. We are passionate, some might even say quirky, and while we love what we do, our lives are about more than work. We love games and are obsessed with creating the best player experience!

Xbox Media builds the player-first, full-stack monetization technology that powers advertising across Xbox surfaces and ad-supported gameplay. We enable meaningful player engagement, publisher success, and platform growth by delivering trusted, high-quality ad experiences at global scale. Backed by Xbox and Microsoft, our platform blends deep gaming insights, privacy-forward data, and world-class engineering to make Xbox Media the most effective and trusted ad platform in gaming.

Requirements

• Significant professional software engineering experience, including substantial experience designing and operating large-scale, high-reliability distributed systems.
• Demonstrated ability to set technical direction for a broad domain and drive that direction to outcomes — not just produce recommendations.
• Strong depth in backend engineering: 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 a track record of building the alignment needed to act on them.
• Ability to evaluate trade-offs across scalability, reliability, cost, security, delivery velocity, and organizational adoption — and communicate those trade-offs clearly to engineers and senior leaders alike.
• Proven experience developing senior engineers and emerging technical leaders; visible impact on the technical capability of the organizations you've worked in.
• Strong working knowledge of the team's production environment (Go, GCP, Cloud Run/GKE, distributed data systems); experience operating systems at significant scale.
• Excellent written and verbal communication: able to explain architecture, risks, and direction in design docs, executive forums, and 1:1 engineering conversations equally well.

Nice To Haves

• You operate at the intersection of technical depth and organizational influence — comfortable in both a design review and a leadership trade-off discussion.
• You lead through credibility and judgment, not authority. Engineers seek out your opinion; product and leadership trust your framing.
• You think in systems: you anticipate second-order effects across teams, users, operations, and business outcomes before committing a direction.
• Pragmatic and outcome-oriented: you balance ideal architecture with delivery reality and measure success by business and engineering impact, not elegance alone.
• You invest in others seriously — the engineers and technical leaders you've developed are a meaningful part of your career record.
• Comfortable with ambiguity at org scale: you can bring structure to undefined technical problems and create momentum before full clarity exists.
• Strong ownership mindset: you don't drop problems at the edges of your scope; you drive them to resolution or hand them off with full context.

Responsibilities

• Own engineering outcomes for org-critical systems, platforms, or technical domains; connect all engineering work to business priorities, product direction, and operational constraints.
• Define long-term technical direction for a broad domain — making high-impact trade-offs across architecture, reliability, cost, security, velocity, and organizational adoption.
• Build and maintain alignment around technical direction across engineering leadership, product leadership, and adjacent organizations.
• Create mechanisms that improve delivery, reliability, and learning across an organization — ensuring teams can execute high-stakes technical work without depending on constant personal intervention.
• Guide sequencing and risk management for the most consequential technical initiatives in the org.
• Develop Staff-level engineers and emerging technical leaders through mentorship, design review, and engineering standards.
• Lead organization-wide technical standards, architecture direction, hiring calibration, and major platform evolution.
• Build reusable systems, practices, and frameworks that materially raise engineering leverage across multiple teams.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, health savings account or health reimbursement account, healthcare spending accounts, dependent care spending accounts, life and AD&D insurance, disability insurance
• 401(k) with Company match, tuition reimbursement, charitable donation matching
• Paid holidays and vacation, paid sick time, floating holidays, compassion and bereavement leaves, parental leave
• Mental health & wellbeing programs, fitness programs, free and discounted games, and a variety of other voluntary benefit programs like supplemental life & disability, legal service, ID protection, rental insurance, and others
• Relocation assistance

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed