Snap
Principal Software Engineer, Ads Platform
$235K–$414K
Palo Alto, California +4 · Principal · Full-time · Posted Sep 30, 2026
- Location
- Palo Alto, California
New York - 229 W 43rd St
Bellevue - 110 110th Ave NE
Santa Monica - 2850 Ocean Park Blvd
San Francisco - 1160 Battery St - Experience
- 10+ years of post-Bachelor’s software development experience; or a Master’s degree in a technical field plus 9+ years of post-grad software development experience; or a PhD in a related technical field plus 6+ years of post-grad software development experience.
- Education
- Bachelor’s in a technical field such as computer science, mathematics, or statistics, or equivalent years of experience.
About the job
Build and lead the development of advertising formats, products, and backend infrastructure that improve advertiser outcomes and support Snap’s performance advertising suite.
What you'll do
- Develop and optimize ad products, formats, and infrastructure through experimentation and analysis.
- Set technical direction across teams and guide scalable, reliable, cost-effective systems.
- Use AI tools and high-velocity engineering workflows to ship secure, production-ready services.
What they ask for
- Excellent programming and software design skills, including debugging, performance analysis, and test design.
- Experience architecting, designing, and developing distributed systems.
- At least 2 years of technical leadership or domain-expert experience, including setting technical direction for engineering projects.
- Proven ability to operate highly available systems at scale and solve ambiguous problems.
Nice to have
- Experience delivering large-scale attribution and measurement projects.
- Backend services or distributed systems experience; ads domain experience.
Pay
USD $276,000-$414,000 annually base salary; USD $262,000-$393,000 annually base salary; USD $235,000-$352,000 annually base salary
AI focus
Use AI tools and adapt to evolving AI systems to design and ship scalable services using modern engineering workflows.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative