Staff Backend Architect, Storage & Caching Platform

Snap Inc.; Santa Monica (CA); On-site; USD 229,000 - 343,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity (RSUs)

Benefits package

Paid parental leave

Medical coverage

Mental health support

Job summary

Snap Inc. is seeking a Staff Technical Lead to define strategy and technical direction for Storage, Caching, and Identity infrastructure. You will lead multi-quarter initiatives, design and operate scalable backend systems on AWS/GCP, and improve reliability, cost efficiency, and developer experience at scale.

You will mentor engineers, shape platform investments, and drive architecture across services, with a focus on AI-enabled improvements in engineering productivity and quality.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field.
• 9+ years of software development experience, or 8+ with MS, or 5+ with PhD.
• Experience leading architecture or platform direction beyond a single team.
• Experience building and operating backend systems in production.

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.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend services

System design

Go

Java

Python

C++

Leadership

Collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering

Tools

Kubernetes

AWS

GCP

Service mesh

Observability tools

Job description

Snap Inc. is seeking a Staff Technical Lead to define strategy and technical direction for Storage, Caching, and Identity infrastructure. You will lead multi-quarter initiatives, design and operate scalable backend systems on AWS/GCP, and improve reliability, cost efficiency, and developer experience at scale.

You will mentor engineers, shape platform investments, and drive architecture across services, with a focus on AI-enabled improvements in engineering productivity and quality.