AI Engineer

AI Engineer

Full-Time 70000 - 90000 £ / year (est.) Home office (partial)
Sony

At a Glance

  • Tasks: Design and build AI features that solve real business problems for PlayStation.
  • Company: Join Sony Interactive Entertainment, a leader in gaming and innovation.
  • Benefits: Enjoy hybrid working, private medical insurance, and 25 days holiday.
  • Other info: Collaborate across teams in a supportive and inclusive environment.
  • Why this job: Be part of a dynamic team creating cutting-edge AI solutions for millions of players.
  • Qualifications: 3+ years in software engineering with hands-on AI experience required.

The predicted salary is between 70000 - 90000 £ per year.

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.

Who we are: The Direct to Consumer (D2C) Data Science organisation comprises Data Science, Data Engineering and ML Engineering practices. D2C Data Science helps PlayStation grow and operate its digital business across commerce, subscriptions, payments, lifecycle experiences and player-facing services. We partner with product, engineering, finance, marketing and operations teams to turn experimentation, forecasting, AI and production-quality measurement into better player experiences.

Role overview: Within D2C Data Science, the D2C ML Engineering team is seeking an AI Software Engineer to help design, build, and support production AI capabilities that solve high-value business problems across SPOC and the broader digital commerce ecosystem. This is not a model-training or predictive-platform ownership role; it is an applied AI engineering role focused on turning AI into dependable products, services, and automation. You will work with core engineering, operations, data, risk, and product partners to build AI-powered workflows that improve speed, quality, insight, and decision support.

The work may include LLM-powered services, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agentic workflows, tool/function calling, evaluation harnesses, guardrails, and reusable AI platform components. The ideal candidate is a strong Software Engineer with backend or platform experience and practical hands-on applied AI experience. You are comfortable building with foundation model APIs, vector and hybrid search, prompt and model evaluation, AI observability, and cloud-based services, and you are eager to learn while contributing to reliable production systems.

What you’ll be doing:

  • Build Applied AI features: Implement services, workflows, and reusable components for LLM-powered automation, retrieval, tool use, summarization, classification, decision support, and knowledge workflows.
  • Solve Business Problems with AI: Collaborate with operations, product, data, risk, and engineering stakeholders to understand use cases, prototype solutions, measure outcomes, and help move proven capabilities into production.
  • Support Agentic Workflows and Integrations: Build AI workflows that use tool/function calling, structured outputs, workflow state, internal APIs, and human review patterns to take useful action while staying auditable and controlled.
  • Develop Retrieval and Knowledge Systems: Contribute to RAG and agentic retrieval pipelines over enterprise content and operational data using embeddings, vector databases, hybrid search, reranking, citations, access controls, and freshness strategies.
  • Improve AI Quality, Safety, and Evaluation: Create and maintain evaluation suites, regression tests, prompt/model versioning, trace analysis, guardrails, policy checks, PII handling, hallucination mitigation, and operational monitoring.
  • Production AI Engineering: Develop scalable APIs, microservices, and event-driven workflows in Python or Java, with attention to reliability, resilience, security, cost efficiency, and clean integration with existing services.
  • Cloud Delivery and Automation: Deploy AI services using AWS, containers, infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, secrets management, observability, and operational runbooks.
  • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Participate in design reviews, implementation planning, troubleshooting, documentation, and knowledge sharing across technical and non-technical teams.

What we’re looking for:

  • 3+ years (or equivalent) of Software Engineering experience within a professional working environment.
  • Hands-on experience building AI or generative AI features that connect model APIs to business workflows, data, documents, or internal services.
  • Coding Proficiency: Strong software engineering skills in Python and/or Java, including API development, testing, debugging, asynchronous processing, and maintainable service design.
  • Cloud Competency: Experience with AWS or equivalent cloud services.
  • RAG and Retrieval Systems: Familiarity with embeddings, chunking, indexing, retrieval strategies, vector and hybrid search, reranking, citations, and vector stores such as OpenSearch, Pinecone, Weaviate, Redis, pgvector, Azure AI Search, or similar technologies.
  • Agent and Workflow Orchestration: Experience with AI orchestration patterns and tools such as LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, OpenAI Agents SDK, N8N, AWS Bedrock Agents and Knowledge Bases, or comparable tools.
  • Structured Outputs and Tool Use: Experience designing prompts, schemas, tool/function calls, workflow contracts, and validation logic so AI systems can produce dependable outputs and interact safely with internal systems.
  • AI Observability and Evaluation: Familiarity with tracing, monitoring, evals, prompt testing, quality metrics, and debugging tools such as LangSmith, Arize Phoenix, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, Splunk, New Relic, CloudWatch, or comparable platforms.

Desirable:

  • Degree and/or qualification in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.
  • Model Context and Connectors: Familiarity with Model Context Protocol (MCP) or similar patterns for connecting AI applications to enterprise tools, databases, documents, and workflows.
  • Multimodal AI Systems: Experience with text, image, document, audio, or video models, including multimodal embeddings, OCR/document understanding, or content moderation workflows.
  • Commerce or Trust Domain Experience: Experience applying AI to fraud, payments, risk, customer support, marketplace operations, trust and safety, content operations, or digital commerce business processes.

Benefits:

  • Hybrid working
  • Discretionary bonus opportunity
  • Private Medical Insurance
  • Dental Scheme
  • London Allowance (if applicable)
  • 25 days holiday per year
  • On Site Gym
  • Subsidised Café
  • Free soft drinks
  • On site bar
  • Access to cycle garage and showers

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.

AI Engineer employer: Sony

At Sony Interactive Entertainment, we pride ourselves on being not just the Best Place to Play, but also the Best Place to Work. Our dynamic work culture fosters innovation and collaboration, offering employees exceptional benefits such as hybrid working, private medical insurance, and a vibrant office environment complete with an on-site gym and café. With ample opportunities for professional growth and a commitment to diversity and inclusion, SIE is an ideal employer for those looking to make a meaningful impact in the world of entertainment technology.

Sony

Contact Details:

Sony Recruitment Team

StudySmarter Expert Advice🤫

We think this is how you could land AI Engineer

Join Local Tech Meetups

Get out there and mingle with fellow developers by joining local tech meetups. It’s a fantastic way to meet people who might be working at Sony or know someone who does. Plus, you can pick up some trendy tech skills and trends while you're at it!

Contribute to Open Source Projects

Show off your coding chops by jumping into open-source projects. Not only does this give you practical experience, but it also gets you noticed in the dev community. You'll create a killer portfolio that speaks volumes about your skills to Sony.

Tap into Online Developer Communities

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Explore Job Boards Specifically for Tech Roles

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We think you need these skills to ace AI Engineer

Applied AI Engineering
Software Engineering
Python
Java
API Development
AWS
Generative AI

Some tips for your application 🫡

Show off your coding skills:When applying for a software engineering role, it's super important to showcase your coding skills. Make sure your CV includes your tech stack, any relevant programming languages you’re comfortable with, and examples of projects you've worked on. If you have a GitHub profile, link it up! We love to see code in action.

Tailor your portfolio:For a full-time role, we’d expect to see some solid examples of your work in your portfolio. Make sure to include at least two or three projects that highlight your problem-solving skills and your ability to work with different technologies. Focus on the projects that are most relevant to the position at Sony.

Craft a killer cover letter:Your cover letter is your chance to stand out—make it personal! Explain why you want to work at Sony and how your skills align with the role. Show us your passion for software development. We dig enthusiastic candidates who understand the value of collaboration and continuous learning!

Be clear and concise:When it comes to writing your CV and cover letter, clarity is key. Avoid jargon that could confuse us and stick to simple, direct language. Highlight your achievements with quantifiable results where possible, and keep everything easy to read. A well-organised application goes a long way!

How to prepare for a job interview at Sony

Brush Up on Your Coding Skills

For a full-time software engineering role, it's crucial that we stay sharp with our coding abilities. Expect technical questions that might involve solving problems on the spot or discussing algorithms. Practise on platforms like LeetCode or HackerRank to get comfortable with the types of questions that often come up.

Know Your Tools and Frameworks

Make sure we’re well-acquainted with the tools and technologies listed in the job description. Familiarise ourselves with any specific frameworks or programming languages mentioned. If Sony uses React or Node.js, for instance, be ready to discuss how we’ve used them in previous projects or coursework.

Showcase Your Projects

Bring along a portfolio that highlights our best work. This could be code samples, GitHub repositories, or any side projects we’ve built. Make sure we can talk through our thought process for each project, especially the challenges we faced and how we solved them—this shows our problem-solving skills in action.

Prepare for Behavioural Questions

While technical skills are key, full-time positions also require cultural fit. Be ready to discuss our previous experiences and how we handle teamwork, conflict, and deadlines. Brush up on the STAR method—Situation, Task, Action, Result—to clearly articulate our past experiences when discussing how we've contributed to a team.