Staff Software Engineer, ML Feature Store

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 join Snap Inc on our Feature Store team!

This tech lead will be responsible for the design of the team's systems and data pipelines, establishing clear abstractions and reusable components so the team builds on common foundations rather than duplicating work. You'll drive development of the core services and data flows - including how data is stored, retrieved and served for both high-throughput and low-latency use cases - while ensuring they meet correctness, performance, and reliability requirements. A central part of the role is enforcing engineering quality through validation, testing, monitoring, and observability and owning the operational health of these systems from cost efficiency to on-call and incident response. Throughout, you'll set technical direction, review designs and code, and mentor engineers, raising the bar on craftsmanship across the team.

What you’ll do:

• Serve features reliably for large-scale batch inference and low-latency online inference, maintaining consistency across serving paths and meeting latency and freshness requirements of production models.

• Maintain features in a centralized, versioned feature registry, ensuring definitions are discoverable, well-documented and reusable across teams and models so common logic is defined once rather than duplicated.

• Design and manage feature storage solutions for correctness, freshness and efficient retrieval, selecting appropriate storage patterns for training-scale reads and low-latency serving lookups.

• Build scalable, distributed systems with attention to compute and storage efficiency, backed by monitoring, alerting, and sound operational practices that keep feature serving systems reliable and maintainable in production.

Knowledge, Skills, Abilities:

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

• Strong technical leadership skills, with the ability to set vision, ideate high-impact projects and translate strategy into executable roadmaps.

• Proven ability to lead complex, cross-functional initiatives over multiple quarters while balancing architectural quality, reliability and delivery velocity.

• Strong foundation in system design, including APIs, service architecture, compute platforms, storage concepts, observability and workflow orchestration.

• Proven track record of owning highly available, mission-critical systems, including operational readiness, incident response and systemic improvements.

• Strong judgment in making technical trade-offs and prioritizing the right long-term platform investments for a large engineering organization.

• Excellent collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to influence engineers and leaders across Senior Manager- or Director-level organizations.

• Ability to mentor, unblock and elevate other engineers while creating structures and mechanisms that make teams more effective over time.

• Comfort operating in ambiguity and driving clarity in technically complex problem spaces.

• Familiarity with responsible use of emerging AI technologies to improve engineering quality, alignment and innovation at scale.

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 large scale storage, backend or distributed systems

Preferred Qualifications:

• Deep expertise in modern C++ (C++11/14/17), with experience in large-scale production codebases

• Experience with C++, Go, Java, Python or similar backend languages.

• Experience with large-scale microservices, cloud infrastructure and/or platform architecture

• Proficiency with performance optimization techniques

• Experience building or scaling ML Infrastructure systems and/or real-time data pipelines

• Strong CS fundamentals (algorithms and data structures) and problem-solving skills

• Comfortable working in a fast-paced, iterative and highly collaborative environment

• Knowledge of software design patterns and best practices

"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:

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