Cloud Game Streaming - Systems Engineer Playstation United Kingdom, London Engineering Cloud Gaming United Kingdom, London a month ago

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.

About GDFT Gaming, Developer, and Future Technology (GDFT) are the technology specialists at PlayStation. We build the underlying systems that power core platform capabilities and developer tools. Our mission is to enable world-class gaming experiences by delivering low-level, high-performance technology for PlayStation platforms.

The Role We are looking for an engineer to join the GDFT department, working on the design and optimisation of PlayStation’s real-time game streaming technologies. You will contribute to the development of low-latency video streaming systems across current and future PlayStation platforms, working on performance-critical areas spanning frame capture, media pipelines, codec configuration, system services and streaming transport. The role is particularly suited to engineers with a strong C/C++ background and experience working with native video or media systems, including embedded devices, TV firmware, set-top boxes, consoles, or similar. Our work sits at the intersection of product engineering and R&D. Alongside delivering production technology, engineers are encouraged to investigate new approaches to reducing end-to-end latency, improving visual quality and reducing bitrate, using measurement and experimentation to determine where meaningful improvements can be made.

What You'll Be Doing

• Develop, optimise and maintain low-level C and C++ components within PlayStation’s game streaming stack.
• Investigate opportunities to reduce end-to-end streaming latency across frame capture, buffering, encoding, transport, decoding and presentation.
• Optimise the use and configuration of hardware video encoders, applying knowledge of codec behaviour and low-latency encoding techniques.
• Analyse existing media pipelines to identify unnecessary buffering, memory copies, synchronisation delays and other sources of latency.
• Use software and hardware instrumentation to measure system behaviour, validate hypotheses and quantify the impact of performance changes.
• Investigate and debug issues across user-space applications, system services and daemon-level components.
• Prototype and evaluate new approaches to improving streaming quality, latency and bandwidth efficiency.
• Work with engineers and researchers across the wider organisation on areas such as codec development, rate control, Forward Error Correction and emerging media technologies.
• Contribute technical findings and recommendations to design discussions, working with senior engineers to determine appropriate production solutions.
• Collaborate across teams to integrate and validate streaming technologies within PlayStation platform software.
• Attend periodic in-person workshops or team events, with travel possible a few times per year.

What We Are Looking For This is a mid-level opportunity. You should bring some of the following skills and experience:

• Strong proficiency in C and C++.
• Experience developing native, performance-sensitive software rather than primarily web or managed application stacks.
• Experience working with real-time video, media pipelines, codecs or embedded multimedia systems.
• Practical understanding of video compression and media formats, including concepts such as chroma subsampling, bit depth and colour representation, with familiarity of codecs such as AVC, HEVC or AV1.
• Understanding of concepts relevant to low-latency video encoding, which may include GOP structures, reference frames, rate control, VBV, quantisation parameters, slices, tiles or hardware codec APIs.
• Strong debugging, profiling and performance-analysis skills.
• An ability to investigate complex technical problems, identify likely causes and use evidence and instrumentation to support conclusions.
• Comfortable working in unfamiliar parts of a large system and developing an understanding of how multiple components interact.
• An experimental mindset, with an interest in prototyping, measuring and evaluating alternative technical approaches.
• Ability to contribute to technical discussions and work with senior engineers when deciding how findings should be taken forward.

Highly Desirable Skills Experience in one or more of the following areas would be advantageous; we do not expect candidates to have experience across all of them:

• Familiarity with techniques for evaluating video codec performance, including bitrate/quality/latency trade-offs and objective or perceptual video quality metrics (such as PSNR and VMAF).
• Familiarity with compressed video bitstreams and codec signalling, such as NAL units/OBUs, parameter sets, profiles/levels and supplemental enhancement information.
• Experience developing native video players, media frameworks or codec pipelines on TVs, set-top boxes, consoles, mobile devices or other embedded platforms.
• Experience configuring or integrating hardware video encoders or decoders.
• Deeper knowledge of H.264, HEVC, AV1 or other current and emerging video codecs, beyond high-level API configuration, such as reference structures, rate-control behaviour, bitstream structure or encoder-specific optimisation.
• Experience optimising real-time video for low latency, visual quality or bitrate efficiency.
• Familiarity with frame capture, graphics presentation pipelines, framebuffers or GPU/CPU synchronisation.
• Experience identifying and reducing memory copies, queueing delays, memory-bandwidth limitations or other system-level performance bottlenecks.
• Experience working with system services, daemons, firmware interfaces or other low-level platform components.
• Familiarity with techniques such as content-aware encoding, region-of-interest encoding, adaptive resolution or frame rate, alternative reference-frame strategies or similar streaming optimisations.
• Experience with Forward Error Correction or other techniques for improving the resilience of real-time media.
• Experience with SIMD, vectorisation, cache optimisation or multithreaded performance tuning with instrumentation.
• Experience with console or embedded systems development environments.
• Experience with Git, Jenkins or similar CI/CD workflows.

Why Work in GDFT Focused on platform-wide technology development, room to explore and innovate within performance-critical system areas, work on cross-regional collaborative projects, flexible and relaxed working environment, with strong support for hybrid work, opportunities for extensive professional development, technical conference attendance, and participation in internal hackathons.

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.

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.