Snap Inc. · Palo Alto, United States
Join Snap Inc. as a Senior Principal Software Engineer, where you will lead the technical direction of Ads Quality within the Ads Platform team. You will shape the multi-year strategy and architecture for bidding, pacing, auctions, inventory and traffic optimization, and ad reranking. Collaborate with engineering, product, data science, and ML teams to improve advertiser performance and grow sustainable revenue while delivering a relevant, engaging experience for Snapchatters.
- Ability to influence across organizational boundaries, communicate complex trade-offs clearly, and develop senior engineers and technical leaders
- Strong technical judgment in balancing advertiser outcomes, revenue, user engagement, system complexity, and operational risk
- Excellent programming and software design skills, including debugging, performance analysis, testing, and operating highly available systems at scale
- Strong foundations in algorithms, optimization, statistics, and distributed systems, with the judgment to choose practical approaches for real-time production environments
- Ability to turn ambiguous business and technical problems into a coherent strategy, measurable objectives, and an executable roadmap across multiple teams
- Deep expertise in one or more areas of ads marketplace optimization, with the ability to reason about interactions across bidding, pacing, auctions, ranking, and user experience
- 3+ years of experience providing technical leadership or serving as a domain expert for a technical organization
- Experience architecting, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems
- Bachelor’s degree in a technical field such as computer science, mathematics, or statistics, or equivalent practical experience
- Experience setting technical direction and leading complex engineering initiatives across multiple teams, from architecture through production delivery and measurable impact
- 10+ years of post-Bachelor’s software development experience; or a Master’s degree in a technical field and 10+ years of post-graduate software development experience; or a PhD in a related technical field and 7+ years of post-graduate software development experience
- Proven track record of delivering significant improvements in advertiser performance, marketplace efficiency, or revenue through ads bidding, pacing, auction, or inventory optimization
- Experience applying machine learning, constrained optimization, control theory, or online learning to budget allocation and real-time marketplace decisions
- Experience with auction theory, mechanism design, pricing, or market dynamics in production advertising systems
- Experience with ad reranking, slate optimization, ad load, placement, or frequency optimization that balances monetization with user engagement and long-term value
- Experience designing marketplace experiments and causal evaluation methods that account for interference, feedback loops, delayed outcomes, and ecosystem effects