Staff Software Engineer, Spam and Abuse

Description

The company is a technology company whose main product is Snapchat, a visual messaging app for staying close to friends, family and the wider world. It also runs Specs Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary focused on making computing more human, along with Bitmoji, Saturn and other digital services.

The Spam & Abuse team is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to serve as the team's technical lead.

The team protects the integrity of every Snapchat account. It works to keep spam, bot and automated accounts off the platform from device and registration onward. It detects and stops account takeover, secures login, recovery and sessions so account owners stay in control, and tracks how adversaries operate off-platform, turning those findings into live defenses. It also runs the shared detection and enforcement platform, which makes real-time account decisions and publishes account risk that teams across the company act on.

The company's Secure Mobile Client team sits alongside this group. It builds the client and backend mechanisms behind sensitive flows such as registration, login and recovery, plus on-device safety features like in-app reporting and end-to-end encryption.

As technical lead, you will span all of these areas, setting the technical vision and architecture for how the team detects, decides and enforces, making the hard calls on where to invest, and raising the standard for how the whole team builds and runs its systems.

Responsibilities

• Define the technical vision and multi-year architecture for Spam & Abuse, covering spam and bot detection, account takeover defense, the detection and enforcement platform, and secure mobile client flows
• Lead design of the team's most complex cross-cutting systems and review others' designs to keep the architecture consistent across areas
• Shape technical strategy with engineering managers and product, and turn it into roadmaps teams can deliver
• Mentor engineers from new hires to senior level and build a culture of technical excellence, ownership and operational rigor
• Work with engineering, product, data science, operations, policy and legal teams across the company to bring account risk and enforcement into their products
• Improve reliability, latency and quality in the critical path for registration, login and messaging, and lead the technical response to major spam, abuse and security incidents
• Anticipate how adversaries change tactics and make sure defenses hold up when they do
• Use AI tools to design and ship scalable services, holding code to strict standards for correctness, security and production readiness

Requirements

• Deep experience designing, building and operating large-scale, low-latency distributed backend systems
• Solid understanding of spam, fraud, fake accounts, account takeover and other adversarial abuse, and how to defend against them
• Proven record of setting technical direction across several teams or areas and getting agreement from engineers, managers and partners
• Good at working through open, ambiguous problems and weighing speed, precision and impact on legitimate users
• Strong mentor with a history of making the engineers around you stronger
• Clear written and verbal communicator who can explain complex technical decisions to technical and non-technical people
• Proficient in Go, Java or Python, and comfortable with big data tools such as BigQuery
• Deep respect for user privacy and security
• Skilled at using AI tools to speed up development, with the judgment to audit output for architecture, performance and security problems
• Bachelor's degree in a technical field such as Computer Science, or equivalent practical experience
• 9+ years of software development experience, or a Master's degree with 8+ years, or a PhD with 5+ years
• Experience as a technical lead, domain expert or owner of complex technical initiatives
• Experience building systems that detect or reduce spam, abuse, fraud, account takeover or other malicious behavior
• Preferred: experience leading trust, integrity, anti-abuse or account security engineering at a large consumer platform
• Preferred: experience with real-time risk scoring and enforcement, and working with machine learning teams to get models into production
• Preferred: experience with authentication, identity, session security or mobile client security
• Preferred: experience with security-sensitive client and backend systems such as device attestation or end-to-end encryption
• Preferred: track record of setting multi-year technical strategy and delivering it through others

Conditions

The company practices a default-together approach and expects team members to work in an office 4+ days per week

In the United States, each work location sits in a pay zone that sets the salary range. Starting pay depends on job-related skills, experience, qualifications, work location and market conditions, and may be negotiable within the range. Pay zones may change in the future.

Zone A (CA, WA, NYC): base salary range of $229,000-$343,000 per year

Zone B: base salary range of $218,000-$326,000 per year

Zone C: base salary range of $195,000-$292,000 per year

This position is eligible for equity in the form of RSUs

The company is an equal opportunity employer and will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in line with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring where they apply

Benefits

• Paid parental leave
• Comprehensive medical coverage
• Emotional and mental health support programs
• Compensation packages that let you share in the company's long-term success