Software Engineer, Level 3

About the role

Design, implement, and operate our most critical and scalable services—ranging from user identity services, friend graph, and our core persistence layer. Work across teams to understand product requirements, evaluate trade-offs, and deliver the solutions needed to build innovative products. You evaluate, appropriately test, and debug your work, striving for high quality. Advocate for and apply best practices when it comes to availability, scalability, operational excellence, and cost management.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and operate highly scalable backend services
• Collaborate with product teams to understand requirements and evaluate trade-offs
• Deliver medium-sized features independently over multiple weeks and PRs
• Monitor, troubleshoot, and resolve operational issues in production systems
• Maintain high standards for system availability, scalability, and cost efficiency

Requirements

• BS/BA degree in a technical field such as Computer Science or equivalent experience
• Experience coding in an industry-standard language (e.g., Java, Kotlin, Swift, Python, C++)
• Experience with backend services or distributed systems
• Ability to independently execute on medium-sized features
• Understanding of operational aspects of systems, including incident response
• Strong collaboration and teamwork skills
• Proven track record of operating highly-available systems at scale

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with NoSQL solutions, Memcache/Redis, Kubernetes, or Google/AWS services
• Expertise in at least one of the following areas:
  • Large-scale microservices and distributed systems
  • Cloud computing and storage systems
  • Infrastructure and large-scale system design
  • Security
  • Networking and data storage

Schedule

This role follows a “default together” approach, requiring in-office work 4+ days per week.

Pay

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 based on job-related skills, experience, qualifications, work location, and market conditions, and may be negotiable within the salary range.

• Zone A (CA, WA, NYC): $118,000–$176,000 annually
• Zone B: $112,000–$167,000 annually
• Zone C: $100,000–$150,000 annually

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

Benefits

• Paid parental leave
• Comprehensive medical coverage
• Emotional and mental health support programs
• Compensation packages that include equity participation in Snap’s long-term success