Staff Software Engineer, Growth Notifications, Level 6

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.

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join Snap!

Growth Notifications aims to drive critical business metrics (e.g. DAU/MAU, story views) through relevant, timely, and personalized but unsolicited communications (‘nudges’) through suitable available channels (e.g. app push, email, sms) in a cost-effective manner while maintaining data accuracy and platform integrity. We drive user growth and engagement by helping the user discover timely, relevant, and personalized content that entices the user to repeatedly come back to the platform and engage in retentive activities. We use interruptive communication channels such as app push notifications, smses, and emails, which demand immediate user attention, and as such, are highly effective in driving user action. 

What you’ll do:

• Design, implement, and operate highly available backend services that power Snapchat’s growth notification platform across multiple communication channels, serving hundreds of millions of users.

• Own the end-to-end architecture for Snap’s Growth Notification systems, with a focus on reliability, observability, cost efficiency, and sustainable DAU/MAU and retention impact.

• Lead technical direction for the Growth Notifications team: define multi‑quarter roadmaps, make high‑quality architectural decisions, and drive large, ambiguous projects from concept through launch and iteration.

• Collaborate across teams to integrate upstream signals and downstream use cases into a coherent, scalable growth notifications platform.

• Advocate for and apply best practices in distributed systems, including SLIs/SLOs, incident management, cost management, and safe, iterative delivery in a high‑leverage, DAU‑critical system.

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities:

• Experience designing, building, and operating backend services or distributed systems at significant scale.

• Proven track record of owning highly-available, mission‑critical systems, including on‑call participation, incident response, and driving systemic fixes.

• Ability to set technical vision and lead complex, cross‑functional initiatives over multiple quarters, balancing architectural quality, reliability, and product velocity.

• Strong foundation in system design (APIs, data models, storage, pub/sub, queues, and workflow orchestration) and performance/latency optimization.

• Deep experience with observability (metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards) and using data to debug, harden, and evolve large-scale systems.

• Excellent collaboration and communication skills; able to work effectively with Product, DS, ML, Design, and other engineering teams to align on requirements and trade‑offs.

• Ability to mentor and uplevel engineers, provide clear technical guidance, and create structures that make the team more effective over time

Minimum Qualifications:

• 9+ years of post-Bachelor’s software development experience; or a Master’s degree in a technical field + 8+ year of post-grad software development experience; or a PhD in a related technical field + 5+ years of post-grad software development experience

• Demonstrated track record of building and operating reliable, scalable services in cloud technologies with a strong focus on observability, cost efficiency, and incident response 

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with one or more of: Java, Go, C++, and/or Python.

• Experience with NoSQL data stores, caches (e.g., Memcache/Redis), and cloud services (Google Cloud, AWS, or similar).

• Experience with pub/sub and task‑queue systems (e.g., Kafka, Google Pub/Sub, Cloud Tasks, or internal equivalents) in high‑throughput environments.

• Experience with notification, messaging, growth, or experimentation platforms, including ranking, targeting, and A/B testing at scale.

• Demonstrated ability to lead technical strategy for a team or domain, influencing architecture, reliability, and long‑term roadmaps across multiple teams.

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.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law (by example, the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring, where applicable).

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):

Zone B:

Zone C: