Staff Software Engineer (ML Feature Store)

• 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
• 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

Benefits

• Up to 28 weeks of parental leave and return-to-work program
• Adoption, surrogacy, infertility, and fertility preservation benefits
• Backup child care coverage, center-based care support, & caregiver assistance
• Dependent Daycare Flexible Spending Account
• Services to support your path to parenthood & beyond - fertility support & family planning via Carrot, SNOO, Hinge Health
• Short-term disability, long-term disability, basic life insurance, and AD&D insurance
• Lactation rooms (based on office location) and breastmilk shipping coverage
• For Snap, employees taking care of loved ones with complex, chronic, or ongoing care needs (i.e. parent with Dementia, spouse with Cancer, child with Autism), your family can save time, money, & stress with Wellthy
• Comprehensive medical coverage, including PPO, HDHP with HSA, and HMO options
• Dental coverage, including orthodontia benefits
• Vision coverage, including frame and contact allowance and LASIK benefits
• Free membership to One Medical for primary and urgent healthcare services
• Business Travel Insurance
• Gym perks and discounts
• Team fitness classes and races
• Sports leagues
• Cooking and nutritional workshops
• Well-being reimbursement
• Unlimited access to virtual physical therapy with Anthem
• 15 sessions per year of mental health for you + dependents through Lyra
• Generous time off and leave programs. In the US, this includes the following:
• Up to 3 weeks (120 hours) of vacation time and 1 floating holiday for non-exempt team members
• 15 sick and safe days per year
• 12 paid holidays per year
• Meditation and yoga classes
• Speaker series, classes, and subscriptions to educational programs
• Social gatherings, team outings, and volunteering programs
• Snap Inc. provides a 401(k) plan that allows you to save on a pre-tax, Roth, and after-tax basis for your retirement (yes, we even have the Mega backdoor option!) Snap will also match 100% up to 3% of your contribution and then 50% on your 4th and 5th%
• Flexible Spending Accounts for healthcare, daycare and commuter
• Health Savings Account with employer contributions
• Rocket Lawyer memberships
• Financial education programs
• Snap exclusive discounts and perks
• Compensation packages that let you share in Snap’s long-term success!

Preferred experience

• Deep experience designing, building and operating backend services or distributed systems at significant scale
• Proven track record of owning highly available, mission-critical systems, including operational readiness, incident response and systemic improvements
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to influence engineers and leaders across Senior Manager- or Director-level organizations
• Strong technical leadership skills, with the ability to set vision, ideate high-impact projects and translate strategy into executable roadmaps
• Comfort operating in ambiguity and driving clarity in technically complex problem spaces
• Proven ability to lead complex, cross-functional initiatives over multiple quarters while balancing architectural quality, reliability and delivery velocity
• Familiarity with responsible use of emerging AI technologies to improve engineering quality, alignment and innovation at scale
• Ability to mentor, unblock and elevate other engineers while creating structures and mechanisms that make teams more effective over time
• Strong foundation in system design, including APIs, service architecture, compute platforms, storage concepts, observability and workflow orchestration
• Strong judgment in making technical trade-offs and prioritizing the right long-term platform investments for a large engineering organization
• 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
• Bachelor’s degree in a technical field such as Computer Science or equivalent practical experience
• 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