Principal Backend Architect — Media Ads (Hybrid SF)

Activision Blizzard, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 171,000 - 317,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision benefits

401(k) with company match

Paid holidays and vacation

Job summary

Activision Blizzard, Inc. is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for the Xbox Media Engineering team in San Francisco. Lead high-scale backend systems for advertising, translate business needs into technical requirements, and drive architectural direction while mentoring senior engineers.

The role emphasizes collaboration across business units, continuous learning, and delivering platform-wide improvements in a hybrid work setting in San Francisco.

Qualifications

• Significant experience designing and operating large-scale, high-reliability distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Own engineering outcomes for org-critical systems and connect work to business priorities.
• Define long-term technical direction for broad domain and make high-impact trade-offs.
• Build and maintain alignment around technical direction across leadership and product teams.
• Create mechanisms to improve delivery, reliability, and learning across the org.
• Guide sequencing and risk management for key technical initiatives.
• Develop staff-level engineers and technical leaders through mentorship and reviews.
• Lead architecture direction, hiring calibration, and platform evolution.
• Build reusable systems and frameworks to raise engineering leverage.

Skills

Large-scale distributed systems

Technical leadership

Backend engineering

Architecture decisions

Communication with senior leadership

Mentorship and staff development

Tools

Go

GCP

Cloud Run/GKE

Distributed data systems

Job description

Activision Blizzard, Inc. is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for the Xbox Media Engineering team in San Francisco. Lead high-scale backend systems for advertising, translate business needs into technical requirements, and drive architectural direction while mentoring senior engineers.

The role emphasizes collaboration across business units, continuous learning, and delivering platform-wide improvements in a hybrid work setting in San Francisco.