PlayStation

Software Development Manager, Social Experiences

PlayStation$184K — $277K *
Consumer Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of software development experience with strong technical evaluation skills.
  • Experience managing multiple engineering teams or complex technical organizations.
  • Skilled in delivering customer-facing software across various system architectures.
  • Proficient in managing client release lifecycles and compatibility challenges.
  • Experience in building production services focused on observability, performance, and reliability.
  • Proven ability to improve engineering quality and team dynamics through effective communication and collaboration.
  • Understanding of AI-assisted engineering opportunities and risks.

Responsibilities

  • Lead and mentor engineers across multiple teams, fostering a culture of growth and accountability.
  • Set clear performance goals and provide teams with the autonomy to reach them.
  • Engage in technical reviews and work closely with technical leaders across multiple domains.
  • Translate product goals into practical technical plans prioritizing balance and reliability.
  • Establish software design and operational standards to ensure quality and efficiency.
  • Enhance the performance and resilience of services operating continuously, focusing on incident management.
  • Explore and promote responsible AI practices in engineering and customer products.

Benefits

  • Top-tier medical, dental, and vision insurance.
  • 401(k) with matching contributions.
  • Generous paid time off.
  • Employee wellness program.
  • Exclusive discounts on Sony products.
  • Potential eligibility for a bonus package.
Full Job Description
Role overview:

We are seeking a Software Development Manager to lead multiple teams building global consumer products supported by highly available, real-time cloud services. You will lead engineers across client-side, server-side, and full-stack development and remain technically engaged through architecture, design, code, and operational reviews. You will combine technical judgment with empathy and humility, creating the clarity, trust, and autonomy experienced engineers need to do their best work. You will help teams evaluate and adopt AI-assisted engineering practices where they improve quality, productivity, or customer outcomes, with appropriate safeguards for privacy, security, intellectual property, and reliability.

Responsibilities:
  • Lead, coach, recruit, and retain engineers across client, server, and full-stack teams while building leadership capacity and providing equitable growth opportunities, timely feedback, and clear performance expectations.
  • Set clear goals and accountability, provide context, and give teams autonomy in how they achieve outcomes.
  • Stay technically engaged through architecture, design, code, and operational reviews while partnering with technical leaders across client applications, APIs, distributed services, data systems, and cloud infrastructure.
  • Translate ambiguous product objectives into achievable technical plans that balance speed, reliability, security, maintainability, cost, and long-term architectural health.
  • Establish practical standards for software design, testing, observability, release management, deployment, documentation, and operational readiness.
  • Improve the resilience, scalability, and performance of services that operate 24/7/365, participate in alert escalation coverage from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. Pacific Time, and promote disciplined incident response and learning-focused reviews that produce durable improvements without blame.
  • Evaluate and advance responsible uses of AI across discovery, development, testing, debugging, documentation, operations, and customer-facing product capabilities.
  • Partner with Product, Design, Data, Security, and other leaders to deliver valuable consumer experiences and communicate priorities, tradeoffs, risks, decisions, and outcomes clearly to technical and nontechnical stakeholders.

Skills and Qualifications:
  • Software development experience sufficient to evaluate architecture, understand code, assess tradeoffs, and guide technical decisions across client applications, APIs, distributed systems, cloud services, and the interactions between device software and backend platforms.
  • Experience managing more than one engineering team, or comparable experience leading a complex organization with multiple technical workstreams.
  • Experience developing and releasing customer-facing software across client-side, server-side, or full-stack systems.
  • Experience with client release lifecycles, such as device or operating-system compatibility, staged rollouts, telemetry, backward compatibility, and coordination with service deployments.
  • Experience building or operating production services, including observability, scalability, performance, reliability, or incident management.
  • Evidence of delivering product outcomes while improving engineering quality, team capability, or organizational effectiveness through clear communication, sound tradeoffs, and effective cross-functional collaboration.
  • Experience coaching engineers across career stages and addressing performance expectations with clarity, consistency, and care.
  • Sound judgment about the opportunities, risks, and limitations of AI-assisted engineering or AI-powered products, with prior delivery of an AI product not required.

Preferred:
  • Experience building and releasing global consumer products with meaningful scale, availability, latency, or device-compatibility requirements.
  • Experience with Java, JavaScript, or TypeScript, or with comparable languages and ecosystems.
  • Experience with public-cloud platforms and cloud-native architectures.
  • Familiarity with mobile, web, streaming, messaging, event-driven, connected-device, embedded, or other real-time technologies.
  • Experience coordinating releases across client applications and cloud services, or leading geographically distributed or hybrid teams.
  • Experience introducing AI development tools, delivering AI-powered capabilities, or leading product or technical transformation.
  • A bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

If your experience is transferable but does not match every preferred qualification, we encourage you to apply.

At SIE, we consider several factors when setting each role's base pay range, including the competitive benchmarking data for the market and geographic location.

Please note that the base pay range may vary in line with our hybrid working policy and individual base pay will be determined based on job-related factors which may include knowledge, skills, experience, and location.

In addition, this role is eligible for SIE's top-tier benefits package that includes medical, dental, vision, matching 401(k), paid time off, wellness program and coveted employee discounts for Sony products. This role also may be eligible for a bonus package. Click here to learn more.

The estimated base pay range for this role is listed below.

$184,600-$277,000 USD

About PlayStation

PlayStation is a video game brand that consists of four home video game consoles, as well as a media center, an online service, a line of controllers, two handhelds and a phone, as well as multiple magazines. The brand is produced by Sony Interactive Entertainment, a division of Sony, with the first PlayStation console released in December 1994, followed by the PlayStation 2 in 2000, the PlayStation 3 in 2006, the PlayStation 4 in 2013, and the PlayStation 5 in 2020. PlayStation also has a strong online presence, with the PlayStation Network (PSN) which provides online gaming, streaming services, and access to the PlayStation Store. The PlayStation brand has become one of the most successful video game brands in history, with over 500 million consoles sold worldwide.
Learn more about PlayStation
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