Staff Software Engineer, Platform Engineering

About the role

The Staff Software Engineer will join the Platform Engineering team to build and own agent harnesses and testing infrastructure, architect Temporal-based workflows and services, and build the telemetry and evaluation layer for Snapchat's mobile apps and multi-cloud backend services.

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

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

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