Staff Software Engineer, Spam and Abuse

Snap•Santa Monica, CA

7d•Onsite

About The Position

Snap Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to serve as the technical lead for its Spam & Abuse team. The team protects Snapchat account integrity by detecting spam, bots, automated accounts, and account takeovers; securing login, recovery, and sessions; tracking adversary activity; and operating a shared platform for real-time account risk decisions and enforcement. The role also spans secure mobile client and backend mechanisms for sensitive flows such as registration, login, and recovery, as well as on-device safety features. As technical lead, you will define the team's technical vision and architecture, lead complex cross-cutting work, and guide investment and execution across multiple areas. You will collaborate with engineering, product, data science, operations, policy, and legal partners, and raise the reliability, latency, quality, security, and operational standards of systems used in critical user flows. Snap expects employees to work in an office at least four days per week under its “default together” policy.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in a technical field such as Computer Science, or equivalent practical experience.
At least 9 years of software development experience; alternatively, a master's degree with at least 8 years of experience, or a PhD with at least 5 years of experience.
Experience as a technical lead, domain expert, or owner of complex technical initiatives.
Experience building systems that detect or mitigate spam, abuse, fraud, account takeover, or other malicious behavior.
Deep expertise designing, building, and operating large-scale, low-latency distributed backend systems.
Strong understanding of adversarial abuse problems, such as spam, fraud, fake accounts, or account takeover, and defenses against them.
Ability to set technical direction across multiple teams or areas and align engineers, managers, and partners.
Ability to solve ambiguous problems and make sound tradeoffs among speed, precision, and impact on legitimate users.
Strong mentorship skills and a record of helping other engineers develop.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including explaining complex technical decisions to technical and non-technical audiences.
Proficiency in a language such as Go, Java, or Python, and comfort working with big data tools such as BigQuery.
Respect for user privacy and security.
Proficiency in or aptitude for using AI tools to streamline development, with judgment to audit generated output for architectural integrity, performance, and security risks.

Nice To Haves

Experience leading trust, integrity, anti-abuse, or account security engineering at a large consumer platform.
Experience with real-time risk scoring and enforcement systems, and working with machine learning teams to put models into production.
Experience with authentication, identity, session security, or mobile client security.
Experience with security-sensitive client and backend systems such as device attestation or end-to-end encryption.
A track record of setting multi-year technical strategy and delivering it through others.

Responsibilities

Set the technical vision and multi-year architecture for Spam & Abuse, including spam and bot detection, account takeover defense, detection and enforcement platforms, and secure mobile client flows.
Lead the design of the team's most complex cross-cutting systems and review designs to maintain coherent architecture.
Drive technical strategy with engineering managers and product partners and translate it into executable roadmaps.
Mentor and develop engineers at different career stages and promote technical excellence, ownership, and operational rigor.
Partner with engineering, product, data science, operations, policy, and legal teams to integrate account risk and enforcement into their products and surfaces.
Improve the reliability, latency, and quality of systems critical to registration, login, and messaging.
Lead technical responses to major spam, abuse, and security incidents.
Anticipate adversary adaptation and ensure defenses remain effective.
Use AI tools to design and ship scalable services while maintaining standards for correctness, security, and production readiness.