Staff Software Engineer, Spam and Abuse

Snap; Santa Monica (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Snap Inc in Santa Monica is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to be the technical lead for the Spam & Abuse team. You will set the vision and architecture for detection, enforcement, and secure mobile client flows while driving cross-team collaboration across product, data science, operations, policy, and legal.

You will mentor engineers, raise reliability and performance, and ensure production-grade systems.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.
• 9+ years of software development experience; or 8+ with Master's; or 5+ with PhD.
• Experience as a technical lead or owner of complex initiatives.
• Experience building systems that detect or mitigate spam, abuse, fraud, or malicious behavior.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical vision and multi-year architecture for Spam & Abuse, spanning detection, enforcement, and secure mobile client flows.
• Lead the design of the team's most complex, cross-cutting systems and ensure architectural coherence.
• Drive technical strategy with engineering managers and product, translating it into actionable roadmaps.
• Mentor engineers across the team and foster a culture of excellence, ownership, and reliability.
• Collaborate with cross-functional partners to integrate risk and enforcement into surfaces.
• Improve system reliability, latency, and production readiness in critical paths (registration, login, messaging).
• Stay ahead of adversaries by designing defenses that scale and adapt.
• Leverage AI tools to design scalable services while auditing for security and performance.

Skills

Distributed backend systems

Spam & abuse domain knowledge

Technical leadership

Mentorship

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science

Tools

Go

Java

Python

BigQuery

Job description

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 operates Snapchat , a visual messaging app that enhances your relationships with friends, family, and the world, and Specs Inc. , a wholly-owned subsidiary dedicated to making computing more human, in addition to Bitmoji , Saturn, and other digital services.

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to be the technical lead for the Spam & Abuse team at Snap!

Spam & Abuse protects the integrity of every Snapchat account. We keep spam, bot, and automated accounts off the platform, from the device and registration through everything those accounts do afterwards. We keep the rightful owner in control of their account by detecting and stopping account takeover and securing login, recovery, and sessions. We track how adversaries operate off-platform and turn that into live defenses. And we run the shared detection and enforcement platform that makes real-time decisions on accounts and publishes account risk that teams across Snap act on. Alongside this, our Secure Mobile Client team builds the client and backend mechanisms behind sensitive flows like registration, login, and recovery, as well as on-device safety surfaces such as in-app reporting and end-to-end encryption.

As the team's technical lead, you'll work across all of these areas. You'll set the technical vision and architecture for how we detect, decide, and enforce, make the hard calls on where to invest, and raise the bar for how the whole team builds and operates its systems.

What you'll do:

• Set the technical vision and multi-year architecture for Spam & Abuse, spanning spam and bot detection, account takeover defense, the detection and enforcement platform, and secure mobile client flows
• Lead the design of the team's most complex, cross-cutting systems, and review the designs of others to keep the architecture coherent across areas
• Drive technical strategy with engineering managers and product, and turn it into roadmaps that teams can execute against
• Mentor and grow engineers across the team, from new hires to senior engineers, and build a culture of technical excellence, ownership, and operational rigor
• Partner with engineering, product, data science, operations, policy, and legal teams across Snap to integrate account risk and enforcement into their surfaces
• Raise the reliability, latency, and quality bar of systems in the critical path for registration, login, and messaging, and lead technical response to major spam, abuse, and security incidents
• Stay ahead of how adversaries adapt, and make sure our defenses are designed to hold up when they do
• Utilize AI tools to design and ship scalable services while upholding rigorous standards for code correctness, security, and production readiness

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities:

• Deep expertise in designing, building, and operating large-scale, low-latency distributed backend systems
• Strong understanding of spam, fraud, fake account, account takeover, or other adversarial abuse problems, and how to defend against them
• Proven ability to set technical direction across multiple teams or areas and get alignment from engineers, managers, and partners
• Skilled at solving open, ambiguous problems and making sound tradeoffs between speed, precision, and impact on legitimate users
• Strong mentorship skills and a track record of making the engineers around you better
• Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to explain complex technical decisions to technical and non-technical audiences
• Proficiency in languages such as Go, Java, or Python, and comfort working with big data tools such as BigQuery
• Deep respect for user privacy and security
• Proficiency in, or a strong aptitude for, leveraging AI tools to streamline development, paired with the critical judgment to audit generated output for architectural integrity, performance bottlenecks, and security risks

Minimum 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 as a technical lead, domain expert or owner of complex technical initiatives
• Experience building systems that detect or mitigate spam, abuse, fraud, account takeover, or other malicious behavior

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience leading trust, integrity, anti-abuse, or account security engineering at a large consumer platform
• Experience with real-time risk scoring and enforcement systems, and working with machine learning teams to put models into productionExperience with authentication, identity, session security, or mobile client security
• Experience with security-sensitive client and bac