Staff Software Engineer, Backend, Level 6

Role Overview

What You Will Do

• Design, implement, and operate critical scalable services, including user identity, friend graph, and core persistence systems.
• Work across teams to understand product requirements, evaluate trade-offs, and deliver solutions.
• Evaluate, test, and debug work to maintain high quality.
• Apply best practices for availability, scalability, operational excellence, and cost management.
• Use AI tools and high-velocity workflows while maintaining code correctness, security, and production-ready quality.

Knowledge and Skills

• Experience with backend services or distributed systems and operating highly available systems at significant scale.
• Independently execute medium-sized features requiring multiple pull requests.
• Understand system operations and participate in incident or hotfix investigation and resolution.
• Experience in at least one area such as microservices, cloud and storage, infrastructure design, security, networking, data storage, or machine learning tools.
• Use AI tools for development and audit generated output for architecture, performance, and security risks.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a relevant technical field or equivalent practical work experience.
• Nine or more years of post-bachelor's software development experience, with alternate experience paths for master's and PhD holders.
• At least one year of technical leadership experience or acting as a technical domain expert.
• Experience with distributed systems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Java, C++, or Python.
• Experience with NoSQL solutions, Memcache or Redis, Kubernetes, or Google/AWS services.

Workplace Policy

• Team members are expected to work in an office four or more days per week under Snap's default together policy.

Compensation

• Zone A base salary range is $229,000 to $343,000 annually.
• Zone B base salary range is $218,000 to $326,000 annually.
• Zone C base salary range is $195,000 to $292,000 annually.
• The position is eligible for equity in the form of RSUs.

Benefits

• Benefits include paid parental leave, comprehensive medical coverage, mental health support, and long-term compensation programs.