Principal Software Engineer | Xbox Media (San Francisco, CA)
About The Position
Xbox Media is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to help build and evolve its Publisher Ads Platform and mobile advertising technologies. The role focuses on high-scale backend systems and org-critical platforms, connecting engineering outcomes to business priorities, product direction, and operational needs. The position is anticipated to be hybrid, with a home office in San Francisco, California. The successful candidate will set long-term technical direction across a broad domain, make high-impact architectural and operational trade-offs, and align engineering, product, and adjacent organizations around that direction. They will guide major technical initiatives, establish standards and mechanisms that improve delivery and reliability, and develop Staff-level engineers and emerging technical leaders. The role calls for deep backend and distributed-systems expertise, significant production-scale experience, and strong communication across technical teams and senior leadership. Xbox Media builds player-first monetization technology for advertising across Xbox surfaces and ad-supported gameplay. The platform combines gaming insights, privacy-forward data, and engineering to support player engagement, publisher success, and platform growth. The company describes its team as collaborative, experimental, sociable, and passionate about games and player experience.
Requirements
- BA/BS degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, plus 11 or more years of relevant professional experience and 15 or more years of total experience.
- 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 it to 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 act on them.
- Ability to evaluate trade-offs across scalability, reliability, cost, security, delivery velocity, and organizational adoption, and communicate them clearly to engineers and senior leaders.
- Proven experience developing senior engineers and emerging technical leaders, with visible impact on organizational technical capability.
- Strong working knowledge of the team's production environment, including Go, GCP, Cloud Run/GKE, and distributed data systems, and experience operating systems at significant scale.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including explaining architecture, risks, and direction in design documents, executive forums, and one-on-one engineering conversations.
Responsibilities
- Own engineering outcomes for org-critical systems, platforms, or technical domains, connecting engineering work to business priorities, product direction, and operational constraints.
- Define long-term technical direction for a broad domain and make 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, enabling teams to execute high-stakes technical work without constant personal intervention.
- Guide sequencing and risk management for the organization's most consequential technical initiatives.
- 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 increase engineering leverage across multiple teams.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision coverage.
- Health savings or health reimbursement account, healthcare spending accounts, and dependent care spending accounts.
- Life and AD&D insurance and disability insurance.
- 401(k) with Company match.
- Tuition reimbursement.
- Charitable donation matching.
- Paid holidays and vacation, paid sick time, and floating holidays.
- Compassion and bereavement leaves and parental leave.
- Mental health and wellbeing programs and fitness programs.
- Free and discounted games.
- Voluntary benefit programs, including supplemental life and disability coverage, legal service, ID protection, and rental insurance.
- Relocation assistance may be available if the Company requires the employee to move geographic locations for the job.
Stand Out From the Crowd
Upload your resume and get instant feedback on how well it matches this job.
What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
