Software Engineer II, Backend

Waterloo, ON

Build what’s next for players.

We’re a startup inside Sony PlayStation: fast-moving, experimental, and highly ambitious, while backed by the scale, resources, and trust of Sony Interactive Entertainment.

We’re building new mobile and web experiences that help gamers connect, discover, and play together in better ways. This is a rare opportunity to build at startup speed and deliver significant impact inside one of the largest gaming companies in the world.

We are seeking a Software Backend Engineer to help design, build, and operate the services and data systems that power our new consumer experiences.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, test, deploy, and operate reliable backend services and APIs for consumer applications across mobile and web.
• Contribute to backend architecture and technical decisions related to scalability, availability, consistency, latency, security, and cost.
• Design and maintain data models using relational and non-relational databases, caching systems, and asynchronous processing patterns.
• Build and maintain GraphQL and REST APIs that support mobile and web client experiences.
• Monitor and improve service performance, reliability, observability, and operational health.
• Partner with product managers, designers, and client engineers to translate product requirements into practical technical solutions.
• Participate in code reviews and share technical knowledge with other members of the engineering team.
  

Requirements

• 3+ years of professional software development experience building backend services or applications.
• BS/MS degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• Proficiency in server-side development (Node.js with TypeScript preferred).
• Experience with relational and non-relational databases, including data modelling, indexing, transactions, and performance optimization (PostgreSQL preferred).
• Experience designing, building, or integrating GraphQL and REST APIs.
• Familiarity with caching, message queues, event streams, or asynchronous processing systems.
• Understanding of cloud infrastructure, containerized services, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure as code.
• Experience working with production systems on AWS or another major cloud platform.

Bonus

• Experience building social, community, gaming, or other consumer products.
• Understanding of real-time communication systems, including messaging, presence, notifications, and activity feeds.
• Experience working with social graphs, recommendation systems, content discovery services, or personalization platforms.
• Familiarity with trust and safety, content moderation, abuse prevention, or user-reporting systems.
• Previous experience at an early-stage startup or on a zero-to-one product team.