Staff Software Engineer, Platform and Infrastructure, 9+ Years of Experience

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.

Snap Engineering teams build fun and technically sophisticated products that reach hundreds of millions of Snapchatters around the world, every day. We’re deeply committed to the well-being of everyone in our global community, which is why our values are at the root of everything we do. We move fast, with precision, and always execute with privacy at the forefront.

We’re looking for a Software Engineer to join Snap Inc on our Core Infrastructure team! 

What you’ll do:

• Design, implement, and optimize infrastructure powering large-scale retrieval and ranking systems, focusing on vector, inverted index, graph retrieval, and real-time data ingestion.

• Develop and enhance ranking and retrieval algorithms for recommendation engines, ensuring efficient and relevant results.

• Lead technical strategy for large-scale retrieval and ranking pipelines, setting roadmaps, creating measurable goals, and driving execution across teams.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including Product, Operations, and Cloud Providers, to develop scalable and efficient infrastructure solutions.

• Evaluate trade-offs between latency, accuracy, and scalability in search and recommendation models, mentoring teams on best practices

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities:

• Hands-on knowledge of cloud infrastructure and operational excellence patterns and practices

• Background with building high availability and mission critical distributed systems

• Experience with Java, Go, C++, and/or Python

• Ability leading and executing large, complex technical initiatives

• Ability to proactively learn new concepts and apply them at work

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in a technical field such as computer science or equivalent experience

• 9+ years industry software engineering experience

• Experience with large scale distributed systems, and Cloud Computing

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience developing and fine-tuning ranking and retrieval infrastructure / algorithms for large-scale recommendation systems.

• Deep understanding of recommendation models, user behavior modeling, and multi-objective optimization in recommendations.

• Hands-on experience with learning-to-rank (LTR) models, reinforcement learning for ranking, and contextual bandits.

• Experience with feature engineering, embedding-based retrieval, and neural search techniques.

If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please don’t be shy and provide us some information.

"Default Together" Policy at Snap: At Snap Inc. we believe that being together in person helps us build our culture faster, reinforce our values, and serve our community, customers and partners better through dynamic collaboration. To reflect this, we practice a “default together” approach and expect our team members to work in an office 4+ days per week. 

At Snap, we believe that having a team of diverse backgrounds and voices working together will enable us to create innovative products that improve the way people live and communicate. Snap is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, and committed to providing employment opportunities regardless of race, religious creed, color, national origin, ancestry, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding, age, sexual orientation, military or veteran status, or any other protected classification, in accordance with applicable federal, state, and local laws. EOE, including disability/vets.

Our Benefits: Snap Inc. is its own community, so we’ve got your back! We do our best to make sure you and your loved ones have everything you need to be happy and healthy, on your own terms. Our benefits are built around your needs and include paid parental leave, comprehensive medical coverage, emotional and mental health support programs, and compensation packages that let you share in Snap’s long-term success!

Compensation

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 salary range for the position. These pay zones may be modified in the future.

Zone A (CA, WA, NYC):

The base salary range for this position is $229,000-$343,000 annually.

Zone B:

The base salary range for this position is $218,000-$326,000 annually.

Zone C:

The base salary range for this position is $195,000-$292,000 annually.

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