Principal Software Engineer | Xbox Media (San Francisco, CA)

Xbox Media Solutions (Formerly Activision Blizzard Media); San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 171,000 - 317,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision

401(k) with company match

Paid holidays & vacation

Relocation assistance

Mental health & wellbeing programs

Job summary

Xbox Media in San Francisco is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead high-scale backend systems for mobile advertising, anchoring technical direction to business goals. This hybrid role is based in San Francisco, CA, with collaboration across engineering, product, and partner teams.

You will mentor staff engineers, set architecture direction, and build reusable platform components while improving reliability and velocity across the org.

Qualifications

• Extensive backend software engineering experience with large-scale systems.
• Experience leading technical direction and architecture decisions across teams.
• Proven ability to mentor staff-level engineers and emerging leaders.
• Strong communication with cross-functional teams across multiple business units.

Responsibilities

• Own engineering outcomes for org-critical systems and connect work to business priorities.
• Define long-term technical direction and balance trade-offs across architecture, cost, and reliability.
• Build alignment across engineering leadership, product leadership, and adjacent orgs.
• Improve delivery, reliability, and learning with scalable processes and automation.
• Guide sequencing and risk management for high-impact initiatives.
• Develop staff-level engineers and mentoring bands through design reviews and standards.
• Lead architecture direction, hiring calibration, and platform evolution.
• Create reusable systems and frameworks to boost engineering leverage.

Skills

Go

GCP

Cloud Run/GKE

Distributed systems

Backend architecture

Mentorship

Cross-functional leadership

Tools

Go

GCP

Cloud Run/GKE

Distributed data systems

Job description

Craft:

Job Description:

Your Role Within the Kingdom

Do you want to build amazing high-scale backend systems for Advertising using the latest technologies? Are you an excellent communicator who enjoys working with people from several different business units? Can you translate business needs into technical requirements and implementation?

If you answered yes, then our Principal Software Engineer role on our Xbox Media Engineering team may be the right role for you!

We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to empower groundbreaking mobile advertising technologies to create the next generation of our Publisher Ads Platform.

We are an impactful team of problem solvers who are constantly reviewing how and why we do things and learning from each other. We are experimental, trying out new tech and ideas, and willing to do things differently to drive the entire industry forward. We are sociable and fun, and we like to hang out together. We are passionate, some might even say quirky, and while we love what we do, our lives are about more than work. We love games and are obsessed with creating the best player experience!

Hybrid

This role is anticipated to be a hybrid work position, and the home office for this role is San Francisco, CA.

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.

Skills to Create Thrills

• 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.

Key Attributes

• You operate at the intersection of technical depth and organizational influence — comfortable in both a design review and a leadership trade-off discussion.
• You lead through credibility and judgment, not authority. Engineers seek out your opinion; product and leadership trust your framing.
• You think in systems: you anticipate second-order effects across teams, users, operations, and business outcomes before committing a direction.
• Pragmatic and outcome-oriented: you balance ideal architecture with delivery reality and measure success by business and engineering impact, not elegance alone.
• You invest in others seriously — the engineers and technical leaders you’ve developed are a meaningful part of your career record.
• Comfortable with ambiguity at org scale: you can bring structure to undefined technical problems and create momentum before full clarity exists.
• Strong ownership mindset: you don’t drop problems at the edges of your scope; you drive them to resolution or hand them off with full context.

We love hearing from anyone who is enthusiastic about changing the games industry. Research shows that women, veterans, and members of other under-represented groups tend to not apply to jobs when they think they may not meet every qualification, when, in fact, they often do! We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment and strongly encourage you to apply.

We are committed to working with and providing reasonable assistance to individuals with physical and mental disabilities. If you are a disabled individual requiring an accommodation to apply for an open position, please email your request to [e-mail]. General employment questions cannot be accepted or processed here. Thank you for your interest.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status, among other characteristics.

Xbox Media builds the player-first, full-stack monetization technology that powers advertising across Xbox surfaces and ad-supported gameplay. We enable meaningful player engagement, publisher success, and platform growth by delivering trusted, high-quality ad experiences at global scale. Backed by Xbox and Microsoft, our platform blends deep gaming insights, privacy-forward data, and world-class engineering to make Xbox Media the most effective and trusted ad platform in gaming.

Rewards

We provide a suite of benefits that promote physical, emotional and financial well-being for ‘Every World’ - we’ve got our employees covered! Subject to eligibility requirements, the Company offers comprehensive benefits including:

• Medical, dental, vision, health savings account or health reimbursement account, healthcare spending accounts, dependent care spending accounts, life and AD&D insurance, disability insurance;
• 401(k) with Company match, tuition reimbursement, charitable donation matching;
• Paid holidays and vacation, paid sick time, floating holidays, compassion and bereavement leaves, parental leave;
• Mental health & wellbeing programs, fitness programs, free and discounted games, and a variety of other voluntary benefit programs like supplemental life & disability, legal service, ID protection, rental insurance, and others;
• If the Company requires that you move geographic locations for the job, then you may also be eligible for relocation assistance.

Eligibility to participate in these benefits may vary for part time and temporary full-time employees and interns with the Company. You can learn more by visiting https://www.benefitsforeveryworld.com/.

In the U.S., the standard base pay range for this role is $171,100.00 - $316,576.00 Annual. These values reflect the expected base pay range of new hires across all U.S. locations. Ultimately, your specific range and offer will be based on several factors, including relevant experience, performance, and work location. Your Talent Professional can share this role’s range details for your local geography during the hiring process. In addition to a competitive base pay, employees in this role may be eligible for incentive compensation. Incentive compensation is not guaranteed. While we strive to provide competitive offers to successful candidates, new hire compensation is negotiable.