Principal Backend Engineer, Ad Tech Platform

King; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 171,000 - 317,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision coverage

401(k) with company match

Paid holidays and vacation

Mental health & wellbeing programs

Relocation assistance if required

Job summary

Activision Blizzard's Xbox Media Engineering team seeks a Principal Software Engineer to empower mobile advertising tech and Publisher Ads Platform. Hybrid role based in San Francisco, combining leadership with hands-on system design on high-scale backend services.

You will guide technical direction, mentor leaders, and build reusable systems across multiple teams to raise engineering leverage. Strong communication and collaboration across business units are essential.

Qualifications

• BA/BS in Computer Science or related field and 11+ years of relevant experience.
• Experience designing and operating large-scale, high-reliability distributed systems.
• Ability to set technical direction and drive it to outcomes across a broad domain.

Responsibilities

• Own engineering outcomes for org-critical systems and connect work to business priorities.
• Define long-term technical direction while balancing architecture, reliability, cost and velocity.
• Build alignment across engineering leadership, product leadership and adjacent teams.
• Improve delivery, reliability and learning with scalable processes and platforms.
• Mentor staff engineers and develop emerging technical leaders.
• Lead architecture direction, hiring calibration and platform evolution.
• Build reusable systems and frameworks to raise engineering leverage.

Skills

Backend architecture

Distributed systems

Leadership

Mentorship

Communication

Trade-off evaluation

Education

BA/BS in CS or related field

Tools

Go

GCP

Cloud Run / GKE

Distributed data systems

Operating systems at scale

Job description

Activision Blizzard's Xbox Media Engineering team seeks a Principal Software Engineer to empower mobile advertising tech and Publisher Ads Platform. Hybrid role based in San Francisco, combining leadership with hands-on system design on high-scale backend services.

You will guide technical direction, mentor leaders, and build reusable systems across multiple teams to raise engineering leverage. Strong communication and collaboration across business units are essential.