Staff Software Engineer – Network Automation

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. Role Overview: We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help shape and build the next generation of our network automation platforms. Our challenge is one of scale, complexity and criticality. We operate a massive global network supporting PlayStation Network, spanning more than 40 interconnection locations and 20+ data centres worldwide. Operating infrastructure at this scale safely and efficiently requires us to move beyond specialist-driven workflows and individual automation tools toward reliable, declarative software platforms. You will help make that transition. You will work on software that turns complex network and infrastructure operations into reliable, API-driven and increasingly self-service capabilities. This includes building control-plane services, declarative APIs and intent-based controllers that manage production infrastructure safely and consistently across our global footprint. This is a Staff-level engineering role with significant technical influence. You will combine hands-on engineering with setting technical direction: defining architectures, solving complex cross-system and distributed-systems problems, writing designs, driving alignment with senior engineers and architects, and mentoring engineers across the team. Your work will directly influence how one of the world's largest gaming networks is operated and automated, while establishing engineering patterns and platforms that can be reused across multiple network domains and services. What you'll be doing: Provide technical leadership and architectural direction for network automation and infrastructure control platforms, treating the self-service network API as a product by working with users and partner teams to define outcomes, establish clear expectations for API behavior and reliability, align on team responsibilities, and ensure those commitments are met. Use domain-driven design with network experts, software engineers and API consumers to establish shared language and bounded contexts, then turn those agreements into versioned, testable contracts. Design and build APIs, services, controllers and reconciliation workflows that manage production infrastructure safely at scale. Build on the Kubernetes API, including custom resources and control loops that continuously converge actual state toward declared intent. Own the operational Kubernetes path: CRD rollout, RBAC and admission, controller health, Helm packaging, deployment drift and incident diagnosis. Design distributed workflows that operate correctly under eventual consistency, at-least-once delivery, concurrent writes and partial failure, with idempotency and safe recovery as fundamental properties. Design stable APIs, schemas and data models used across team boundaries, including versioning and backwards compatibility. Develop patterns for multi-tenant infrastructure platforms, including tenant isolation, authorization, policy enforcement and safe automation boundaries. Establish strong approaches to testing, observability and change safety for software that changes live infrastructure. Improve software delivery practices through automated CI gates, versioned artifacts, controlled promotion, and safe deployment and recovery strategies. Lead complex migrations and mod