Senior Principal Engineer, Data & Machine Learning

PlayStation Global•San Mateo, CA

7h•$304,200 - $456,200•Onsite

About The Position

Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) is seeking a Senior Principal Engineer, Data & Machine Learning to serve as the chief architect for their Data & Intelligence organization. This role is one of SIE's most senior individual-contributor positions, reporting directly to the Vice President of the organization. The position involves shaping how SIE builds, reuses, and activates trusted data and intelligence, with a focus on creating a connected intelligence layer where trusted context about players, content, partners, and the business is built once, reused everywhere, and activated at the point of decision. This is a hands-on role requiring the authoring of architectures, reference implementations, prototyping, and direct intervention when technical problems risk important outcomes.

Requirements

15+ years in software, data or machine learning engineering, including 9+ years leading the architecture and delivery of large-scale, complex systems.
A track record of authoring architectures, standards or platforms that were adopted across multiple organizations and stayed 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 being the deciding technical voice in, an architecture review forum spanning multiple engineering organizations.
Deep expertise in at least two of: reusable data products, semantic and metadata layers and data contracts; ML platforms, lifecycle management, evaluation and decisioning; real-time signals, distributed inference and activation platforms; experimentation and causal measurement; generative AI, retrieval and agentic systems; responsible AI, privacy and technical governance.
Strong command of distributed systems, cloud, data architecture, APIs, security, reliability, observability and performance engineering.
Demonstrated ability to influence senior executives, engineering and product leaders, and cross-functional partners without direct authority.
Outstanding written communication. This role leads 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 Haves

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

Responsibilities

Set the architecture for, and drive reuse across, initiatives defining the next three years of data and intelligence at PlayStation, including a single, reusable understanding of the player, content and game understanding, creator and partner intelligence, unified measurement, activation, semantic and conversational intelligence, enterprise decision data, and trusted foundations and golden paths.
Chair the architecture review forum: set its charter and cadence, publish decisions, track adoption and hold the line on non-conforming designs.
Own the boundary decisions between platform capabilities built for reuse and domain delivery, and keep them stable.
Define and ratify the standards teams build against: data contracts, golden paths, model evaluation and experimentation, observability, reliability, cost and lifecycle management.
Lead the technical direction of the hardest cross-organizational initiatives; author proposals, reference designs and prototypes that establish a credible path from concept to production.
Work directly with engineering and data science teams to remove critical blockers, so that decisions become usable capabilities rather than architecture on paper.
Partner with security, privacy, legal, governance and responsible-AI teams to embed controls throughout the data and ML lifecycle, including the responsible use of proprietary data, third-party and foundation models, and externally hosted AI services.
Identify duplicative capabilities, drive rationalization and retirement, and improve interoperability across SIE’s data and ML landscape.
Advise senior executives on major technical investments, tradeoffs, emerging capabilities and long-term risk; produce the written recommendations that drive annual planning.
Connect technical investment to named consumers, decisions and measurable outcomes; define how we measure adoption, reuse, time-to-action, quality, reliability, safety and cost.
Lead a community of Principal Engineers; mentor Principal, Staff and Senior engineers, architects, ML engineers and data scientists.
Represent SIE’s data and machine learning direction in senior leadership forums, partner organizations and, where appropriate, the broader industry.