Staff Tech Lead, Storage & Caching

Snap Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 218,000 - 343,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Paid parental leave

Medical coverage

Equity RSUs

Job summary

Snap Inc. in San Francisco is seeking an L6 Staff Technical Lead to define strategy and direction for Storage, Caching, and Identity infrastructure.

In this hands-on leadership role, you will design, build, and operate highly available distributed systems across AWS and GCP, improving reliability, performance, cost efficiency, and developer experience at scale. You will mentor engineers and influence architecture across infrastructure and product engineering teams.

Qualifications

• 9+ years of software development experience in production systems.
• Experience leading architecture or platform direction beyond one team.
• Hands-on staff-level contributor with cross-functional collaboration.

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

Backend systems design

Distributed systems

Technical leadership

Go/Java/Python/C++

Kubernetes

Observability

Incident response

Mentoring engineers

AI for infrastructure

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science

Master’s degree preferred

PhD in a related field

Tools

Go

Java

Python

C++

Kubernetes

AWS

GCP

Job description

Snap Inc. in San Francisco is seeking an L6 Staff Technical Lead to define strategy and direction for Storage, Caching, and Identity infrastructure.

In this hands-on leadership role, you will design, build, and operate highly available distributed systems across AWS and GCP, improving reliability, performance, cost efficiency, and developer experience at scale. You will mentor engineers and influence architecture across infrastructure and product engineering teams.