Senior Software Engineer, Audio Validation Systems

About Sony Interactive Entertainment: Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) is the company behind the PlayStation brand, delivering cutting‑edge hardware, software, and network services worldwide.

Senior Software Engineer, Audio Quality Engineering

Location: United Kingdom, London

The role

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer, Audio Quality Engineering to design, build, and own tools, systems, and automated analysis pipelines that help ensure the quality, correctness, and reliability of audio technologies within the PlayStation SDK. In this role, you will work closely within the QE team and with the Audio SDK team and other platform engineering groups to develop software that validates audio output, detects regressions, measures quality, and provides actionable feedback to engineers. You will help define how we evaluate audio behaviour across libraries, platforms, and SDK releases, building robust developer‑facing and internal tools that improve confidence in PlayStation audio technologies. The ideal candidate combines strong software engineering skills in C/C++ and Python with a practical understanding of digital audio, signal analysis, test automation, and SDK quality. You should be comfortable working independently, making technical trade‑offs, collaborating across teams, and turning ambiguous quality problems into reliable engineering systems.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain audio quality tools, automated analysis systems, and test infrastructure for PlayStation SDK audio libraries and technologies.
• Write high‑quality C/C++ and Python code to analyse audio output, detect regressions, compare behaviour across SDK versions, and validate correctness against expected results.
• Build systems that support repeatable audio quality measurement, including signal analysis, spectral comparison, perceptual metrics, conformance checks, and regression detection.
• Own audio quality engineering features end to end, from requirements and design through implementation, CI integration, documentation, maintenance, and long‑term support.
• Work closely with Audio SDK engineers to understand new features, define testability requirements, and ensure quality is considered early in design and implementation.
• Develop tooling that gives engineers clear, actionable insight into audio defects, quality trends, and behavioural changes.
• Support SDK release quality by improving automated validation, build/test pipelines, reporting, dashboards, and failure investigation workflows.
• Investigate complex audio issues using a combination of debugging, data analysis, signal processing, and collaboration with domain experts.
• Help define engineering standards for audio quality tooling, including maintainability, reproducibility, performance, scalability, and documentation.
• Collaborate with platform, tools, test, release, and globally distributed engineering teams to improve audio quality processes across the SDK.
• Mentor other engineers, share technical knowledge, and contribute to a culture of high‑quality, testable, maintainable software.

Qualifications

Must‑haves

• Strong professional experience in software engineering, ideally with ownership of tools, systems, SDK components, test infrastructure, or quality‑focused engineering projects.
• Excellent C/C++ and Python programming skills.
• Practical knowledge of digital audio fundamentals, such as PCM audio, sample rates, channels, latency, dynamic range, frequency‑domain analysis, filtering, resampling, encoding, or spatial audio concepts.
• Experience designing, implementing, and maintaining automated test systems, analysis tools, or quality pipelines.
• Ability to analyse complex technical problems, evaluate trade‑offs, and deliver robust, maintainable solutions with minimal supervision.
• Strong debugging and problem‑solving skills, including the ability to investigate failures across software, tooling, data, and environment boundaries.
• Experience setting up CI/CD systems, source control, code review, and modern collaborative development workflows.
• Ability to write clear technical documentation and communicate complex topics to both audio specialists and non‑audio stakeholders.
• Strong collaboration skills, with experience working across engineering, QA, release, tools, or platform teams.
• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Audio Technology, Mathematics, Physics, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to haves

• Experience developing audio analysis algorithms or automated audio quality metrics.
• Familiarity with perceptual or objective audio quality approaches such as PESQ, POLQA, PEAQ, loudness measurement, spectral comparison, null testing, impulse response analysis, latency measurement, or glitch/dropout detection.
• Experience with game audio, console audio, real‑time audio systems, middleware, audio engines, or SDK development.
• Experience testing or validating APIs, runtime libraries, command‑line tools, or developer‑facing SDK components.
• Experience with spatial audio, 3D audio, binaural rendering, ambisonics, HRTFs, object‑based audio, or immersive audio formats.
• Experience with automated reporting, dashboards, telemetry, or trend analysis for quality and reliability.
• Experience with GTest, CppUnit, PyTest, or similar test frameworks.
• Experience with Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or similar CI systems.
• Experience with performance profiling, numerical correctness testing, floating‑point tolerances, or cross‑platform determinism.
• Experience producing high‑quality tools, samples, or documentation used by other engineers or external developers.
• Track record of technical leadership, mentoring, or leading features across multiple teams.

Success looks like

You will help raise the confidence, reliability, and quality of PlayStation SDK audio technologies by building tools and systems that make audio behaviour measurable, repeatable, and actionable. Your work will allow engineers to identify regressions earlier, understand quality changes faster, and deliver better audio experiences to game developers and players. At the Senior Software Engineer level, we expect you to be proactive and independent, to own technical areas end to end, to influence multiple teams, and to contribute to engineering practices that improve quality beyond your immediate workstream.

Benefits

• Technology development is not constrained by a specific game or engine; there is space to research, prototype, and develop foundational technologies used across PlayStation.
• Opportunities to collaborate with engineering and R&D teams across London, Tokyo, San Mateo, and the wider Sony group.
• Time and support to investigate new approaches, improve engineering systems, and contribute ideas that raise the quality bar.
• Opportunities to take part in global hackathons and cross‑team innovation projects.
• A relaxed working environment with a high level of trust and autonomy, where engineers are encouraged to express their views and challenge the status quo.

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.

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