Staff Software Engineer, Platform Engineering

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 operates Snapchat, a visual messaging app that enhances your relationships with friends, family, and the world, and Specs Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary dedicated to making computing more human, in addition to Bitmoji, Saturn, and other digital services.

We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join the Platform Engineering team!

Platform Engineering builds the tools, frameworks, and internal platforms that help engineers at Snap develop high-quality software in a fast development cycle, with a strong focus on quality, developer productivity, and operational excellence. In this role, you’ll help build the next generation of AI-powered testing tools and infrastructure across Snapchat’s mobile apps and multi-cloud backend services, including agent harnesses, evaluation systems, Temporal-based workflows, and telemetry-driven debugging capabilities. You’ll work across teams to turn product and engineering needs into scalable platforms that reduce manual work, surface regressions earlier in CI/CD, and make it easier for engineers to ship reliable software faster.
 

What you’ll do:

• Build and own agent harnesses and testing infrastructure—tool design, prompt engineering, context management, and output evaluation—to drive functional and load testing across Snapchat's mobile apps and multi-cloud backend services

• Push AI-native engineering practices across the team: writing reusable skills, standing up looped and scheduled agents, building MCP tools, and offloading ops work (deploys, log triage, JIRA updates) to agents instead of doing it by hand

• Architect Temporal-based workflows and services that speed up detection of bugs and regressions in the CI/CD pipeline, applying async Python, workflow determinism constraints, and typed dataclass-driven design

• Build the telemetry and evaluation layer that makes agent behavior measurable—writing non-trivial BigQuery SQL, reasoning about mobile telemetry (Blizzard-style events, client vs. server timestamps, sampling), and turning raw logs into actionable hypotheses

• Work across teams to understand product requirements, evaluate trade-offs, and deliver the solutions needed to ship innovative products

• Advocate for and apply best practices around availability, scalability, operational excellence, and cost management

• Be part of a passionate team building the next generation of Snapchat's AI-powered testing tools and infrastructure

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities:

• Experience designing, building, and operating backend services or distributed systems at significant scale.

• Proven track record of owning highly-available, mission‑critical systems, including on‑call participation, incident response, and driving systemic fixes.

• Ability to set technical vision and lead complex, cross‑functional initiatives over multiple quarters, balancing architectural quality, reliability, and product velocity.

• Strong foundation in system design (APIs, data models, storage, pub/sub, queues, and workflow orchestration) and performance/latency optimization.

• Deep experience with observability (metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards) and using data to debug, harden, and evolve large-scale systems.

• Excellent collaboration and communication skills; able to work effectively with Product, DS, ML, Design, and other engineering teams to align on requirements and trade‑offs.

• Ability to mentor and uplevel engineers, provide clear technical guidance, and create structures that make the team more effective over time

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in a technical field such as Computer Science, or equivalent practical experience

• 9+ years of software development experience; or Master’s degree with 8+ years of experience; or PhD with 5+ years of experience

• Experience acting as a technical lead, domain expert, or owner of complex technical initiatives

• Experience building backend systems or distributed systems in production environments

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with Java, Go, Python, C++, or similar backend languages

• Experience with large-scale microservices, cloud infrastructure, storage systems, or platform architecture

• Experience with Kubernetes, containerized systems, data infrastructure, or service platforms

• Experience with developer tooling, CI/CD, internal platforms, or engineering productivity systems

• Experience building AI developer tools, coding assistants, eval systems, or workflow automation for engineers

• Experience driving multi-year technical direction for a platform or infrastructure area 

• Track record of delivering large-scale, high-impact technical work across team boundaries

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.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law (by example, the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring, where applicable).

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):

Zone B:

Zone C: