Principal Software Engineer, Level 7

Snap Snap · Consumer · Los Angeles, CA +1

Principal Software Engineer at Snap, focusing on designing, implementing, and scaling critical engineering components and services for strategic initiatives. The role involves cross-team collaboration, advocating for best practices in availability, scalability, and operational excellence, and providing company-wide technical direction. Requires strong software design, distributed systems architecture, and technical leadership skills.

What you'd actually do

  1. Design, implement, and scale critical engineering components and services to support Snap's most strategic initiatives
  2. Work across teams to understand product requirements, evaluate trade-offs, and deliver the solutions needed to build innovative products or services
  3. Advocate for and apply best practices when it comes to availability, scalability, operational excellence, and cost management
  4. Provide technical direction that influences the entire company

Skills

Required

  • Excellent programming and software design skills, including debugging, performance analysis, and test design
  • Proven track record of operating highly-available systems at scale
  • Ability to proactively learn new concepts and technology and apply them at work
  • Skilled at solving ambiguous problems
  • Strong collaboration and mentorship skills
  • Bachelors in technical field such as computer science, mathematics, statistics or equivalent years of experience
  • 10+ years of post-Bachelor’s software development experience; or a Master’s degree in a technical field + 9+ year of post-grad software development experience; or a PhD in a related technical field + 6+ years of post-grad software development experience
  • 2+ years of experience with technical leadership or acting as the domain-expert to a technical organization
  • Experience in technical leadership/ownership and setting technical direction for engineering projects
  • Experience architecting, designing, and developing distributed systems

Nice to have

  • Advanced degree in a technical field such as computer science
  • Experience with cross platform development
  • Ability to promote product excellence and collaboration, driving a portfolio of concurrent engineering projects, from short-term critical feature launches to long-term research initiatives.
  • Ability to create a compelling vision for the future, communicate clearly, and have a collaborative leadership approach.

What the JD emphasized

  • technical leadership
  • technical direction
  • architecting, designing, and developing distributed systems