An opportunity is available for a Principal Services Engineer at teamLFG, a studio focused on creating a new franchise at PlayStation centered on deep social games. This senior engineering role will drive the development, architecture, and scaling of the backend services for a new live-service game.

This is a full-time, remote position in the United States.

Role Summary and Live-Service Architecture Mandate

The Principal Services Engineer is a technical leader responsible for the entire lifecycle of the game’s backend services, from initial requirements and architecture to production implementation and on-call support. The role requires expertise in building high-scale distributed systems and strong cross-disciplinary communication.

Key Responsibilities

• Service Development: Build and maintain production-quality backend game services from prototype to production.
• Architecture & Design: Design a comprehensive, pragmatic services architecture covering all aspects of a live-services game, including sessions, matchmaking, player data, and service partitioning.
• Collaboration & Communication: Collaborate daily with a cross-disciplinary team to design service features. Write clear, concise technical documentation and effectively summarize complex topics to achieve alignment across multiple teams.
• Production Operations: Calmly deal with production incidents and participate in an on-call rotation after the game launches.
• System Diagnosis: Ability to diagnose complex system failures using logging and metrics.

Required Experience and Technical Qualifications

The ideal candidate is an expert in distributed systems, proficient in the Rust programming language, and skilled at navigating the complexities of high-scale, live-service environments.

• Systems Expertise: Production experience with distributed systems (or other non-deterministic software architectures) in a high-scale, high-latency environment.
• Programming (Required): Ability to write, debug, and maintain code in Rust.
• Communication: Ability to communicate with customers (internal and external) of different technical and non-technical backgrounds.
• Technical Troubleshooting: Ability to diagnose complex system failures using logging and metrics.
• Culture: Embrace a “we” culture, demonstrating outstanding collaboration and communication skills.

Nice-to-Have Qualifications

• Experience with “games as a service” online game development.
• Experience leading (direct management, mentoring, or guiding) engineers.
• Ability to write, debug, and maintain code in C++.