Staff Software Engineer – Network Automation

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 modernization of existing automation, services and data models, evaluating when components should be evolved, replaced or rewritten, and ensuring safe coexistence, behavioral compatibility and retirement of legacy paths.
• Drive technical alignment across software engineering, networking, operations and architecture teams; lead decisions within your area of accountability, contribute constructively to decisions owned by others, and make technology choices based on long-term company and product value.
• Mentor engineers, lead technical and design reviews, and raise software engineering standards across the wider organization.

What we're looking for:

Must have

• Deep expertise in a backend language such as Python, Go, Rust or Java, including asynchronous concurrency, static typing, data modelling and validation, API development, packaging and tooling.
• Strong experience building Kubernetes controllers or operators, including custom resources and reconciliation/control-loop patterns.
• Strong experience building event-driven distributed systems, particularly eventual consistency, at-least-once delivery, idempotency, optimistic concurrency and partial-failure handling.
• Experience designing and building self-service, multi-tenant platforms, including tenant isolation, policy and access control.
• Strong API and schema design skills, including versioning and schema evolution for interfaces consumed by other teams and systems.
• Demonstrated technical leadership across team boundaries, including driving architectural designs, building agreement among senior technical stakeholders and mentoring other engineers.
• A track record of taking ambiguous, technically complex problems from architecture through to reliable production systems that manage large-scale infrastructure, such as networks, compute or cloud resources.

Nice to have

• Networking fundamentals, particularly BGP, IP fabrics and VXLAN/EVPN/L3VPN.
• Working knowledge of Go, sufficient to understand and contribute to adjacent services and controllers.
• Experience designing testing and observability strategies for production infrastructure automation, including systems and backends that cannot be fully reproduced in CI.
• Experience with graph databases, or with source-of-truth systems that model infrastructure and its relationships.

The impact

You will help establish the architecture and engineering practices behind a new generation of network automation, moving from individual scripts and specialist-driven workflows toward declarative, model-driven and reliable platforms.

At Staff level, your impact is expected to extend beyond the code you personally deliver. You will help shape the APIs and designs other teams build on, develop other engineers, and establish technical patterns that can be reused across multiple network domains and services.