Senior Software Engineer AI (Contractor)

Sony Interactive Entertainment; Aliso Viejo (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Sony Interactive Entertainment is seeking an experienced Engineer for Agentic & AI Engineering in Aliso Viejo, CA. You will design and operate agentic applications, craft MCP interfaces, and drive reliable, production‑grade AI systems. Collaborate with teams to advance agentic development patterns and steward tooling across CI/CD pipelines.

The role emphasizes hands‑on coding, architecture leadership, and mentoring, with deep focus on multi‑agent orchestration and structured output evaluation.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience with AI/LLM-powered or agentic apps.
• Strong programming skills and fundamentals: API design, testing, debugging, code reviews.
• Experience with agentic SDKs, MCP, and LLM tooling, including RAG and context management.
• Proven ability to design MCP tool/resource interfaces and ensure reliability.
• Experience integrating AI into CI/CD and developer workflows.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate production‑quality agentic applications using SDKs/harnesses and multi‑agent orchestration.
• Design Model Context Protocol tool and resource interfaces for safe, reliable backend access.
• Engineer prompts for structured JSON output and build evaluation frameworks.
• Manage context across long documents and multi‑agent handoffs with escalation patterns.
• Provide hands‑on technical leadership through architecture reviews and mentoring.

Skills

Agentic architecture

Prompt engineering

Programming: Java, Python, Go, Rust, C

CI/CD integration

Multi-agent systems

Mentoring & leadership

Tools

AWS

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

GitOps

Job description

Why Sony Interactive Entertainment?

Sony Interactive Entertainment isn’t just the Best Place to Play — it’s also the Best Place to Work. Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) is the company behind the PlayStation brand. As a subsidiary of Sony Group Corporation, we’re part of a proud legacy of innovation and excellence. SIE is a dynamic technology company, delivering cutting‑edge hardware and network services to more than 100 million people and an entertainment leader, home to some of the most beloved and recognizable intellectual properties (IP) in the world. Our role at SIE is to create and nurture the experiences under the PlayStation brand, a name synonymous with entertainment excellence and creativity.

Agentic & AI Engineering

• • Design, build, and operate production-quality agentic applications using agentic SDKs/harnesses — including multi-agent orchestration, subagent delegation, tool integration, and lifecycle hooks.
  • Design Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool and resource interfaces that give coding agents/harnesses safe, reliable access to backend systems and enterprise data.
  • Engineer prompts for reliable structured output (JSON schemas, few-shot examples, validation/retry loops) and build evaluation frameworks to measure and improve output quality.
  • Manage context effectively across long documents, multi-turn conversations, and multi-agent handoffs; design escalation and human-in-the-loop patterns for production reliability.

Developer Productivity

• • Configure and extend Codex/Claude Code for team-wide use: AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md hierarchies, custom slash commands, Agent Skills, path‑specific rules, and plan mode.
  • Integrate agentic development into CI/CD pipelines for automated code review, test generation, and PR feedback, tuned to minimize false positives and duplicate findings.
  • Build and maintain MCP server integrations (project- and user‑scoped) that extend agent‑native development capabilities across engineering workflows.
  • Identify high‑value opportunities for AI‑assisted development and design reusable capabilities that multiple teams can adopt, not just one‑off solutions.

Discovery, Prototyping & Production Delivery

• • Partner directly with engineering teams to understand workflows, pain points, and opportunities through hands‑on discovery.
  • Rapidly prototype and validate new AI capabilities with real users, then take successful prototypes into secure, observable, maintainable production systems.
  • Own the full lifecycle: implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, and iteration.

Technical Leadership

• • Provide hands‑on technical leadership through architecture discussions, code reviews, and troubleshooting of agentic systems.
  • Mentor engineers on agentic design patterns, prompt engineering, and agent‑native development practices.
  • Communicate tradeoffs, risks, and results clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
  • Contribute to engineering standards, reusable patterns, and documentation that help other teams build effectively with agentic development tools.

Requirements

• • 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant hands‑on work building and operating AI/LLM-powered or agentic applications.
  • Strong programming skills (Java, Python, Go, Rust, or C++) and solid engineering fundamentals — API design, testing, debugging, code review, maintainable code.
  • Practical, production‑grade experience with agentic SDKs/harnesses, MCP, and LLMs — tool use, orchestration, RAG, context management, structured output, and evaluation.
  • Experience designing MCP tool/resource interfaces and reasoning about tool selection, error handling, and reliability in multi‑agent systems.
  • Demonstrated experience integrating AI into CI/CD and developer workflows.
  • Ability to work in ambiguous problem spaces, evaluate tradeoffs, and make pragmatic engineering decisions.
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills, with experience mentoring and leading through influence.
  • Build and maintain an engineering knowledge base for agentic workflows, including content ingestion, organization, updates, and retrieval. Connect it to agents through RAG and MCP so they can use trusted, current information with source citations.

Preferred Qualifications

• • Demonstrated expertise across agentic architecture, MCP integration, Codex/Claude Code configuration, prompt engineering, and context management.
  • Experience building multi-agent research or customer support systems, or structured data extraction pipelines.
  • Experience with AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and GitOps in support of AI/agentic infrastructure.
  • Familiarity with vector databases, embeddings, and AI evaluation frameworks.
  • Contributions to open-source projects involving AI, agentic systems, or developer tooling.
  • Strong systems thinking — understands how models, agents, tools, context, APIs, data, and infrastructure fit together as production systems, and can reason about dependencies and tradeoffs across the stack.
  • A track record of adapting quickly to new AI tools, models, and frameworks as the space evolves.

Please note, Sony Interactive Entertainment conducts background checks at the offer stage for all new employees (which may include criminal background checks for some roles) and will need to process personal information to support these checks.

Please refer to our Candidate Privacy Notice (where applicable) for more information about what personal information we collect, how we use it, who we share it with, and your data protection rights.

Equal Opportunity Statement:

Sony is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All persons will receive consideration for employment without regard to gender (including gender identity, gender expression and gender reassignment), race (including colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin), religion or belief, marital or civil partnership status, disability, age, sexual orientation, pregnancy, maternity or parental status, trade union membership or membership in any other legally protected category.

We strive to create an inclusive environment, empower employees and embrace diversity. We encourage everyone to respond.

Sony Interactive Entertainment is a Fair Chance employer and qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records will be considered for employment.