About the position

Xbox Media is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to help build and evolve its Publisher Ads Platform and mobile advertising technologies. The role focuses on high-scale backend systems and org-critical platforms, connecting engineering outcomes to business priorities, product direction, and operational needs. The position is anticipated to be hybrid, with a home office in San Francisco, California. The successful candidate will set long-term technical direction across a broad domain, make high-impact architectural and operational trade-offs, and align engineering, product, and adjacent organizations around that direction. They will guide major technical initiatives, establish standards and mechanisms that improve delivery and reliability, and develop Staff-level engineers and emerging technical leaders. The role calls for deep backend and distributed-systems expertise, significant production-scale experience, and strong communication across technical teams and senior leadership. Xbox Media builds player-first monetization technology for advertising across Xbox surfaces and ad-supported gameplay. The platform combines gaming insights, privacy-forward data, and engineering to support player engagement, publisher success, and platform growth. The company describes its team as collaborative, experimental, sociable, and passionate about games and player experience.

Responsibilities

• Own engineering outcomes for org-critical systems, platforms, or technical domains, connecting engineering work to business priorities, product direction, and operational constraints.
• Define long-term technical direction for a broad domain and make 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, enabling teams to execute high-stakes technical work without constant personal intervention.
• Guide sequencing and risk management for the organization's most consequential technical initiatives.
• 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 increase engineering leverage across multiple teams.

Requirements

• BA/BS degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, plus 11 or more years of relevant professional experience and 15 or more years of total experience.
• 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 it to outcomes.
• Strong backend engineering depth in 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 building alignment to act on them.
• Ability to evaluate trade-offs across scalability, reliability, cost, security, delivery velocity, and organizational adoption, and communicate them clearly to engineers and senior leaders.
• Proven experience developing senior engineers and emerging technical leaders, with visible impact on organizational technical capability.
• Strong working knowledge of the team's production environment, including Go, GCP, Cloud Run/GKE, and distributed data systems, and experience operating systems at significant scale.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including explaining architecture, risks, and direction in design documents, executive forums, and one-on-one engineering conversations.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Health savings or health reimbursement account, healthcare spending accounts, and dependent care spending accounts.
• Life and AD&D insurance and disability insurance.
• 401(k) with Company match.
• Tuition reimbursement.
• Charitable donation matching.
• Paid holidays and vacation, paid sick time, and floating holidays.
• Compassion and bereavement leaves and parental leave.
• Mental health and wellbeing programs and fitness programs.
• Free and discounted games.
• Voluntary benefit programs, including supplemental life and disability coverage, legal service, ID protection, and rental insurance.
• Relocation assistance may be available if the Company requires the employee to move geographic locations for the job.