Staff Software Engineer, Platform Engineering

Snap Inc.•Los Angeles, CA

1d•$195,000 - $343,000•Hybrid

About The Position

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. 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.

Requirements

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
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

Nice To Haves

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

Responsibilities

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