Data Engineer

Staff Data Engineer (ICDS)

San Mateo, CA

Play Station is for The Players.

With over 150 million customers in 109 countries, Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) is committed to using data to understand The Players: our customers, better than anyone else. Using the networked power of Play Station systems, we learn how they use them for gaming, streaming, music, and payments, to improve customer experience. ICDS delivers data that powers Analytics, Data sciences, Marketing, ML, and other teams across the Play Station business: high quality, valuable to the user, accessible, and continuously improving.

ICDS Staff Data Engineer

We are looking for a Staff Data Engineer to join the ICDS Player DE team within the Sony Play Station environment.

A Staff Data Engineer is required to own and evolve large-scale streaming and batch data platforms, providing technical leadership and architectural direction across the data ecosystem.

Based in our San Mateo offices, the team provides data services for various global business units associated with Sony Play Station.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and evolution of large-scale batch and real-time data platforms using Apache Spark, Flink, and Databricks
• Define streaming and event-driven architectures (low-latency, exactly-once, high-throughput) using Flink and Scala
• Set architectural standards for data reliability, scalability, observability, and cost efficiency
• Own end-to-end system design for mission-critical data products
  , from ingestion to consumption

• Build and maintain high-performance data pipelines in Scala and Python for both batch and streaming workloads
• Develop real-time processing jobs (windowing, stateful processing, joins) using Flink
• Optimize Spark jobs for performance, cost, and data correctness on Databricks
• Implement robust data quality checks, schema evolution, and fault tolerance

• Drive best practices for CI/CD, automated testing, and deployment of data pipelines
• Establish monitoring, alerting, and SLAs for data systems
• Lead efforts in capacity planning, performance tuning, and cost optimization
• Partner with SRE / Platform teams on reliability, scaling, and incident response
• Ensure code is fully scalable, maintainable, and performant

• Work closely with product managers, analytics, ML, and backend teams to translate business requirements into scalable data solutions
• Enable downstream use cases including analytics, reporting, experimentation, and machine learning
• Influence data modeling and contract design to ensure long-term platform sustainability
• Work proactively to address project requirements, and articulate issues and challenges with enough lead time to address project delivery risk
• Requires the ability to work in a global and multi-cultural environment. Team members are in multiple geographies, resulting in time constraints due to time zones differences and a requirement for occasional travel

• Mentor senior and mid-level data engineers; raise the technical bar across the organization
• Lead technical reviews, design discussions, and post-incident analyses
• Influence data engineering strategy across multiple teams or domains
• Act as a go-to expert for streaming systems, Spark optimization, and distributed data processing

• Ensure data platforms adhere to security, privacy, and compliance requirements
• Define best practices for data access control, lineage, and auditing
• Drive standardization around data formats, schemas, and lifecycle management

• BS Degree in Engineering or Masters, Computer Science or equivalent experience
• 3-5+ years in a technical leadership or staff-level role (design ownership, mentoring, architecture decisions)
• 10-12+ years of hands-on experience building and operating large-scale data pipelines and platforms
• 10-12+ years of relevant industry experience, including ownership of complex, high-impact data systems used at scale
• 10
  - 12+ years of experience in database development, programming (Scala,Python) design, and analysis
• 10
  - 12+ years of experience with distributed framework…