Software Development Manager, Social Experiences

Location: United States, San Diego, CA 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. Role overview: We are seeking a Software Development Manager to lead multiple teams building global consumer products supported by highly available, real-time cloud services. You will lead engineers across client-side, server-side, and full-stack development and remain technically engaged through architecture, design, code, and operational reviews. You will combine technical judgment with empathy and humility, creating the clarity, trust, and autonomy experienced engineers need to do their best work. You will help teams evaluate and adopt AI-assisted engineering practices where they improve quality, productivity, or customer outcomes, with appropriate safeguards for privacy, security, intellectual property, and reliability. Responsibilities: Lead, coach, recruit, and retain engineers across client, server, and full-stack teams while building leadership capacity and providing equitable growth opportunities, timely feedback, and clear performance expectations. Set clear goals and accountability, provide context, and give teams autonomy in how they achieve outcomes. Stay technically engaged through architecture, design, code, and operational reviews while partnering with technical leaders across client applications, APIs, distributed services, data systems, and cloud infrastructure. Translate ambiguous product objectives into achievable technical plans that balance speed, reliability, security, maintainability, cost, and long-term architectural health. Establish practical standards for software design, testing, observability, release management, deployment, documentation, and operational readiness. Improve the resilience, scalability, and performance of services that operate 24/7/365, participate in alert escalation coverage from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. Pacific Time, and promote disciplined incident response and learning-focused reviews that produce durable improvements without blame. Evaluate and advance responsible uses of AI across discovery, development, testing, debugging, documentation, operations, and customer-facing product capabilities. Partner with Product, Design, Data, Security, and other leaders to deliver valuable consumer experiences and communicate priorities, tradeoffs, risks, decisions, and outcomes clearly to technical and nontechnical stakeholders. Skills and Qualifications: Software development experience sufficient to evaluate architecture, understand code, assess tradeoffs, and guide technical decisions across client applications, APIs, distributed systems, cloud services, and the interactions between device software and backend platforms. Experience managing more than one engineering team, or comparable experience leading a complex organization with multiple technical workstreams. Experience developing and releasing customer-facing software across client-side, server-side, or full-stack systems. Experience with client release lifecycles, such as device or operating-system compatibility, staged rollouts, telemetry, backward compatibility, and coordination with service deployments. Experience building or operating production services, including observability, scalability, performance, reliability, or incident management. Evidence of delivering product outcomes while improving engineering quality, team capability, or organizational effectiveness through clear communication, sound tradeoffs, and effective cross-functional collaboration. Experience coaching engineers across career stages and addressing performance expectations with clarity, consistency, and care. Sound judgment about the opportunities, risks, and limitations of AI-assisted engineering or AI-powered products, with prior delivery of an AI product not required. Preferred: Experience building and releasing global consumer products with meaningful scale, availability, latency, or device-compatibility requirements. Experience with Java, JavaScript, or TypeScript, or with comparable languages and ecosystems. Experience with public-cloud platforms and cloud-native architectures. Familiarity with mobile, web, streaming, messaging, event-driven, connected-device, embedded, or other real-time technologies. Experience coordinating releases across client applications and cloud services, or leading geographically distributed or hybrid teams. Experience introducing AI development tools, delivering AI-powered capabilities, or leading product or technical transformation. A bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience. If your experience is transferable but does not match every preferred qualification, we encourage you to apply. At SIE, we consider several factors when setting each role’s base pay range, including the competitive benchmarking data for the market and geographic location. Please note that the base pay range may vary in line with our hybrid working policy and individual base pay will be determined based on job-related factors which may include knowledge, skills, experience, and location. In addition, this role is eligible for SIE’s top-tier benefits package that includes medical, dental, vision, matching 401(k), paid time off, wellness program and coveted employee discounts for Sony products. This role also may be eligible for a bonus package. Click here to learn more. The estimated base pay range for this role is listed below. $184,600 — $277,000 USD 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 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.