Principal Backend Architect – Media Platform (Hybrid SF)

King

San Francisco (CA)

Hybrid

USD 171,000 - 317,000

Full time

14 days+

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Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

401(k) match

Paid time off

Relocation assistance

Job summary

Activision Blizzard in San Francisco, CA is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to empower the Xbox Media Engineering team to build high-scale backend systems for mobile advertising. You will translate business needs into technical requirements and establish long-term technical direction across a broad domain.

The role emphasizes architecture, reliability, and collaboration with cross-functional teams, with a hybrid work arrangement in the SF area.

Qualifications

BA/BS in Computer Science, or related technical field, plus 11+ years of relevant professional experience (15+ years total).
Significant professional software engineering experience, including substantial experience designing and operating large-scale, high-reliability distributed systems.
Demonstrated ability to set technical direction for a broad domain and drive that direction to outcomes — not just produce recommendations.
Strong depth in backend engineering: service architecture, APIs, data modeling, reliability engineering, and production operations at scale.
Experience making high-stakes architecture decisions with company-wide or multi-team consequences, and a track record of building the alignment needed to act on them.
Ability to evaluate trade-offs across scalability, reliability, cost, security, delivery velocity, and organizational adoption — and communicate those trade-offs clearly to engineers and senior leaders alike.
Proven experience developing senior engineers and emerging technical leaders; visible impact on the technical capability of the organizations you've worked in.
Strong working knowledge of the team's production environment (Go, GCP, Cloud Run/GKE, distributed data systems); experience operating systems at significant scale.
Excellent written and verbal communication: able to explain architecture, risks, and direction in design docs, executive forums, and 1:1 engineering conversations equally well.

Responsibilities

Own engineering outcomes for org-critical systems, platforms, or technical domains; connect all engineering work to business priorities, product direction, and operational constraints.
Define long-term technical direction for a broad domain — making high-impact trade-offs across architecture, reliability, cost, security, velocity, and organizational adoption.
Build and maintain alignment around technical direction across engineering leadership, product leadership, and adjacent organizations.
Create mechanisms that improve delivery, reliability, and learning across an organization — ensuring teams can execute high-stakes technical work without depending on constant personal intervention.
Guide sequencing and risk management for the most consequential technical initiatives in the org.
Develop Staff-level engineers and emerging technical leaders through mentorship, design review, and engineering standards.
Lead organization-wide technical standards, architecture direction, hiring calibration, and major platform evolution.
Build reusable systems, practices, and frameworks that materially raise engineering leverage across multiple teams.