Principal Software Engineer, Media Delivery Platform

Snap Inc is a technology company. We believe the camera presents the greatest opportunity to improve the way people live and communicate. Snap contributes to human progress by empowering people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world, and have fun together. The Company’s three core products are Snapchat, a visual messaging app that enhances your relationships with friends, family, and the world; Lens Studio, an augmented reality platform that powers AR across Snapchat and other services; and its AR glasses, Spectacles.

Snap Engineering teams build fun and technically sophisticated products that reach hundreds of millions of Snapchatters around the world, every day. We’re deeply committed to the well-being of everyone in our global community, which is why our values are at the root of everything we do. We move fast, with precision, and always execute with privacy at the forefront.

We’re looking for a Principal Engineer to join the Media Delivery Platform team! We’re a highly collaborative team that builds an end-to-end media platform, including encoding, transcoding, editing, uploading, ingestion, storage, media life cycle management, replication, delivery and playback. This is an unique opportunity to own one of our most critical platforms and make impacts to hundreds of millions of Snapchatters.

You’ll work on state of art video technologies, lead skillful engineers with video expertises, and build an end-to-end video infrastructure that powers critical Snap user experiences. If you’re passionate about video technologies and eager to make an impact, we’d love to have you on our team.

What you’ll do:

• Design, implement, and scale critical mobile media platform and media backend services to support Snap's most strategic initiatives

• Drive media quality optimizations end-to-end from mobile devices to backend services

• Make intelligent trade-offs among media quality, media performance and cost

• Work across teams to understand product requirements, evaluate trade-offs, and deliver the solutions needed to build innovative media platform and services

• Advocate for and apply best practices when it comes to availability, scalability, operational excellence, and cost management

• Provide technical direction that influences the entire company

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities

• Excellent programming and software design skills, including debugging, performance analysis, and test design

• Proven track record of operating highly-available systems at scale

• Ability to proactively learn new concepts and technology and apply them at work

• Skilled at solving ambiguous problems

• Strong collaboration and mentorship skills

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelors in technical field such as computer science, mathematics, statistics or equivalent years of experience

• 10+ years of software development experience in industry

• Experience in technical leadership/ownership and setting technical direction for engineering projects

• Experience architecting, designing, and developing distributed systems

Preferred Qualifications:

• Advanced degree in a technical field such as computer science

• Experience with cross-platform development

• Ability to promote product excellence and collaboration, driving a portfolio of concurrent engineering projects, from short-term critical feature launches to long-term research initiatives.

• Ability to create a compelling vision for the future, communicate clearly, and have a collaborative leadership approach.

• Expertises in building media processing pipelines across client applications 

• Expertise in building backend media platforms 

• Expertises in media quality around VMAF, Non reference VQA, Encoder optimizations across mobile and backend.

If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please don’t be shy and provide us some information.

"Default Together" Policy at Snap: At Snap Inc. we believe that being together in person helps us build our culture faster, reinforce our values, and serve our community, customers and partners better through dynamic collaboration. To reflect this, we practice a “default together” approach and expect our team members to work in an office 4+ days per week. 

At Snap, we believe that having a team of diverse backgrounds and voices working together will enable us to create innovative products that improve the way people live and communicate. Snap is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, and committed to providing employment opportunities regardless of race, religious creed, color, national origin, ancestry, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding, age, sexual orientation, military or veteran status, or any other protected classification, in accordance with applicable federal, state, and local laws. EOE, including disability/vets.

Our Benefits: Snap Inc. is its own community, so we’ve got your back! We do our best to make sure you and your loved ones have everything you need to be happy and healthy, on your own terms. Our benefits are built around your needs and include paid parental leave, comprehensive medical coverage, emotional and mental health support programs, and compensation packages that let you share in Snap’s long-term success!

Compensation

In the United States, work locations are assigned a pay zone which determines the salary range for the position. The successful candidate’s starting pay will be determined based on job-related skills, experience, qualifications, work location, and market conditions. The starting pay may be negotiable within the salary range for the position. These pay zones may be modified in the future.

Zone A (CA, WA, NYC):

The base salary range for this position is $276,000-$414,000 annually.

Zone B:

The base salary range for this position is $262,000-$393,000 annually.

Zone C:

The base salary range for this position is $235,000-$352,000 annually.

This position is eligible for equity in the form of RSUs.