Snap
Principal Software Engineer, Ads Format
$235K–$414K
Palo Alto, California +5 · Principal · Full-time · Posted Sep 25, 2026
- Location
- Palo Alto, California
Seattle, Washington
San Francisco, California
Los Angeles, California
New York, New York
Bellevue, Washington - Experience
- 10+ years of post-Bachelor’s software development experience; or a Master’s degree in a technical field + 9+ years of post-grad software development experience; or a PhD in a related technical field + 6+ years of post-grad software development experience. Also requires 2+ years of technical leadership or acting as a domain expert.
- Education
- Bachelor’s degree, or a Master’s degree in a technical field, or a PhD in a related technical field.
About the job
Leads the design and development of scalable ad-format infrastructure and automated systems for serving, optimizing, and testing ads to improve user engagement and advertiser ROI.
What you'll do
- Set technical vision and lead development of next-generation ad-format infrastructure.
- Build automated ad serving, optimization, and A/B testing systems; promote availability, scalability, operational excellence, and cost management.
- Collaborate across teams and mentor engineers.
What they ask for
- Deep expertise building and scaling ad formats or similar user-facing content delivery systems; ads domain experience.
- Strong programming, software design, debugging, performance analysis, and test-design skills; experience operating highly available systems at scale.
- Architecting, designing, and developing distributed systems; technical leadership or ownership and setting project direction.
- 2+ years of technical leadership or acting as a domain expert.
Nice to have
- Client-side and full-stack experience.
- Cross-platform development; ability to lead concurrent engineering projects and communicate a collaborative vision.
Pay
$276,000-$414,000 annually (base salary, Zone A); $262,000-$393,000 annually (base salary, Zone B); $235,000-$352,000 annually (base salary, Zone C)
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