Senior Technical Operations Developer

Why PlayStation?

PlayStation isn’t just the Best Place to Play — it’s also the Best Place to Work. Today, we’re recognized as a global leader in entertainment producing The PlayStation family of products and services including PlayStation®5, PlayStation®4, PlayStation®VR, PlayStation®Plus, acclaimed PlayStation software titles from PlayStation Studios, and more.

PlayStation also strives to create an inclusive environment that empowers employees and embraces diversity. We welcome and encourage everyone who has a passion and curiosity for innovation, technology, and play to explore our open positions and join our growing global team.

The PlayStation brand falls under Sony Interactive Entertainment, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sony Group Corporation.

Senior Technical Operations Developer – London, UK 

PlayStation Studios User Research is a team that serves all of PlayStation’s global first- and second-party game development studios. We conduct research with players throughout the development process and deliver data and insights to development teams to help them improve the games and to ensure players have the incredible experiences our studios intend for them to have.

To do this work, we have created bespoke, high-tech playtest labs and proprietary toolsets that allow us to livestream our play sessions to studio partners and collect and analyze data efficiently. We are looking for a skilled developer to work with our global Technical Operations team to help with building out those toolsets and supporting the technical requirements of the research.

Principal responsibilities

• Building tools that provide solutions for the end-to-end research process.

• Helping define and being accountable for the long-term technical roadmap and technical requirements for the team’s research tools infrastructure.

• Anticipating incremental changes to the team’s technical needs and planning accordingly to pursue improvements to existing tools and systems.

• Sizing and prioritizing tasks and the roadmap within an agile development workflow.

• Designing and utilizing structured feedback mechanisms to continuously evolve research tooling.

• Maintaining and troubleshooting holistic lab systems.

• Creating scalable solutions for wide-ranging technical troubleshooting and self-help for a large team.

• Proactively educating the research team and Studio teams about research tools and infrastructure.

• Owning relationships with relevant vendor partners and internal partners.

Qualifications

• Experienced with full-stack coding for web-based applications primarily in PHP, JS, React, and utilizing relational databases.

• Understanding of common services in AWS, including deploying and operating containerized services, networking fundamentals, and monitoring/alerting.

• Technical writing.

• Non-technical skills are as important as technical:

• Strong verbal and written communicator.

• Interest in learning & growing.

• Willingness to collaboratively solve problems with their broad range of technical knowledge.

• Critical thinker and problem solver.

• Can-do attitude for troubleshooting and creating solutions.

• Contributes to an existing strong team culture centered on openness, helpfulness, playfulness, and psychological safety.

• Ability to work quickly and re-prioritise work when necessary to unblock expensive and time-sensitive playtests.

PlayStation Studios User Research has a hybrid working model. The Senior Technical Operations Developer will need to be onsite when configuring or setting up lab equipment. When there is not a need to work onsite in the playtest labs, this position may work from home or wherever they feel most productive.

Though not required, the ideal candidate will also have a love of video games and a passion for empowering game development teams and our research team to do their best work.

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.

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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. 

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