Staff Software Engineer, Core Infrastructure

About the Role

Snap Inc. is seeking an L6 Staff Tech Lead to join our team responsible for building, managing, and scaling the critical Service Infrastructure that powers Snap's entire backend. This role focuses on Service & Compute Infrastructure, offering the opportunity to shape the architecture and technical direction of one of Snap's most critical platforms. It's an exciting chance to define how Snap's Service Infrastructure evolves to meet the demands of an AI-first world.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical direction for Snap’s Service Infrastructure platform, defining multi-quarter and multi-year roadmaps across areas such as service mesh, compute, observability, and adjacent platform capabilities.
• Design, build, and operate foundational backend infrastructure that powers critical services across Snap with a focus on reliability, scalability, performance, and operational excellence.
• Act as a hands-on Staff-level tech lead, driving ambiguous and high-impact technical initiatives from concept through architecture, implementation, rollout, and iteration.
• Partner closely with engineers and leaders across infrastructure and product teams to align on technical direction, priorities, trade-offs, and long-term platform investments.
• Improve the developer and operator experience for teams building on Snap’s backend platform by creating durable systems, abstractions, and mechanisms that raise engineering velocity and quality at scale.
• Drive best practices in service reliability, observability, incident response, system performance, and cost efficiency across mission-critical infrastructure.
• Mentor and uplevel other engineers, provide technical leadership across team boundaries, and help resolve complex technical conflicts to move the organization forward.
• Help shape how Snap’s infrastructure evolves for an AI-first future, including identifying opportunities where AI can improve platform quality, developer productivity, or operational workflows in a responsible and scalable way.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 9+ years of software development experience; or a Master’s degree in a technical field and 8+ years of software development experience; or a PhD in a related technical field and 5+ years of software development experience.
• Experience as a technical lead, domain expert, or owner of complex technical initiatives.
• Experience building and operating backend systems or distributed systems in production environments.
• Experience leading architecture or platform direction beyond an individual team, with demonstrated influence across stakeholders and partner teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with service infrastructure domains such as service mesh, compute platforms, observability, or related backend platform systems.
• Experience with large-scale microservices, cloud infrastructure, storage systems, or platform architecture.
• Experience with Go, Java, Python, C++, or similar backend languages.
• Experience with Kubernetes, containerized systems, developer platforms, or internal infrastructure tooling.
• Experience driving long-term technical strategy for a platform or infrastructure area.
• Track record of delivering large-scale, high-impact technical work across team boundaries.
• Experience applying AI to infrastructure, developer tooling, platform quality, or engineering productivity is a plus.

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 determined based on job-related skills, experience, qualifications, work location, and market conditions. The starting pay may be negotiable within the following salary ranges:

• Zone A (CA, WA, NYC): $229,000-$343,000 annually
• Zone B: $218,000-$326,000 annually
• Zone C: $195,000-$292,000 annually

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

Benefits

Snap Inc. offers comprehensive benefits, including paid parental leave, medical coverage, emotional and mental health support programs, and compensation packages that let you share in Snap’s long-term success.

Schedule

Snap practices a "default together" approach, expecting team members to work in an office 4+ days per week.