Quality Engineer, Level 5

Snap Inc is a technology company. We believe the camera presents the greatest opportunity to improve the way people live and communicate. Snap contributes to human progress by empowering people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world, and have fun together. The Company’s three core products are Snapchat, a visual messaging app that enhances your relationships with friends, family, and the world; Lens Studio, an augmented reality platform that powers AR across Snapchat and other services; and its AR glasses, Spectacles.

Spectacles is home to the Spectacles brand and a world-class research & development team, working together to pave the way for the future of the camera and innovating how creative computing will be overlaid on the world around us.

The Spectacles Software Engineering Team works at the intersection of the latest in camera technology and software systems. We are responsible for innovating and developing products that will change the paradigms of computing and, ultimately, impact how we interact with the world around us. We work on wearables and look to push the boundaries of what is possible.

We’re looking for a Quality Engineer (L5) to join the Spectacles Systems, Integration and Test team!

This external-facing role focuses on ensuring the highest quality standards for AR experiences built on our platform. You will collaborate closely with external developers and partners building advanced lenses and immersive use cases, deeply understand how their experiences operate, and collaborate with our teams to build automated test systems to protect critical use cases across releases. This role works cross-functionally with engineering, product, program, and support teams—and frequently interfaces directly with external developers.

What you’ll do

• Serve as a technical quality liaison, bridging developer issues to internal engineering, support, and product teams with clear, action-oriented communication

• Collaborate with the QE team to develop, maintain, and execute automated regression suites for complex partner AR experiences across Spectacles platforms and device configurations

• Develop lenses in Lens Studio for testing scenarios, automation workflows, and performance benchmarking

• Develop tools and scripts to improve the efficiency of the manual testing team

• Analyze developer-built experiences to understand architecture, performance characteristics, and potential quality risks

• Investigate and triage issues (including crashes and performance data) surfaced through internal testing or external developer reports, isolating root causes in the experience, Lens Studio, platform, or OS

• Monitor, triage, and analyze crash data, logs, and system telemetry to proactively identify failure patterns and quality risks

• Develop, document, and execute comprehensive test plans; identify, document, and track bugs using Jira and other crash reporting tools

• Test across various devices and platforms and report critical information to aid in debugging

• Support manual testing of builds to identify regressions

• Conduct onsite visits with developers as needed to understand environments, reproduce issues, and accelerate resolution

• Drive the creation of quality gates for AR experience submissions, ensuring stability, performance, and compatibility standards

• Collaborate closely with product, engineering, QA, Developers, and TPMS to plan test strategies and drive issues to resolution

• Support the integration and release process through managing and reviewing fixes

• Proactively identify gaps in quality processes, implement systemic improvements, and drive initiatives to enhance product quality

• Create and maintain detailed documentation of QA processes, test plans, and test cases

• Manage and prioritize multiple projects, ensuring timely and successful execution of QA deliverables

• Organize and run test sessions in the Santa Monica office with the local team

• Regularly use the products to continuously improve test coverage and maintain stability

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities

• Strong debugging, tracing, and root-cause analysis capabilities across hardware, firmware, and application layers

• Ability to understand complex AR experiences, including how they use compute resources, sensors, and rendering pipelines

• Experience designing and implementing system-level or end-to-end automated tests for hardware + software integrated products

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to translate technical details clearly for both internal stakeholders and external developers

• Ability to work autonomously, manage multiple parallel priorities, and proactively drive issues to completion.

• Skill in building test frameworks, performance benchmarks, and measurement tooling

• Familiarity with AR/VR performance constraints, including thermal characteristics, GPU/CPU profiling, and resource-intensive workloads

• Comfort working in maturing or early-prototype development environments

• Natural curiosity for products, new technology, and innovation

• High attention to detail and excellent interpersonal and customer-focused skills; strong team player

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in a technical field such as computer science or equivalent experience

• 6+ years of industry experience in quality engineering or QA for integrated hardware/software systems

• Experience writing or maintaining automation in Python, C/C++, Java, or similar languages

• Experience debugging hardware-software interactions, performance issues, and system-level defects

• Proficiency with QA tools, crash analysis tooling, and common development environments

• Ability to travel (~20%) for onsite developer support

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with AR/VR, gaming, or real-time 3D applications, including a background with Lens Studio, Unity, Unreal, or other 3D engines

• Experience leveraging AI in workflows and automation to improve quality and efficiency

• Experience building and leveraging dashboards in Looker or other data analysis tools to troubleshoot reports

• Experience testing IoT or wearable devices, mobile systems, or Android-based hardware, and familiarity with fleet-management deployments or remote configuration workflows

• Passion for identifying and classifying issues to improve quality, and strong passion for creativity and solving cutting-edge industry problems

If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please don’t be shy and provide us some information.

"Default Together" Policy at Snap: At Snap Inc. we believe that being together in person helps us build our culture faster, reinforce our values, and serve our community, customers and partners better through dynamic collaboration. To reflect this, we practice a “default together” approach and expect our team members to work in an office 4+ days per week. 

At Snap, we believe that having a team of diverse backgrounds and voices working together will enable us to create innovative products that improve the way people live and communicate. Snap is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, and committed to providing employment opportunities regardless of race, religious creed, color, national origin, ancestry, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding, age, sexual orientation, military or veteran status, or any other protected classification, in accordance with applicable federal, state, and local laws. EOE, including disability/vets.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law (by example, the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring, where applicable).

Our Benefits: Snap Inc. is its own community, so we’ve got your back! We do our best to make sure you and your loved ones have everything you need to be happy and healthy, on your own terms. Our benefits are built around your needs and include paid parental leave, comprehensive medical coverage, emotional and mental health support programs, and compensation packages that let you share in Snap’s long-term success!

Compensation

In the United States, work locations are assigned a pay zone which determines the salary range for the position. The successful candidate’s starting pay will be determined based on job-related skills, experience, qualifications, work location, and market conditions. The starting pay may be negotiable within the salary range for the position. These pay zones may be modified in the future.

Zone A (CA, WA, NYC):

The base salary range for this position is $173,000-$259,000 annually.

 

Zone B:

The base salary range for this position is $164,000-$246,000 annually.

Zone C:

The base salary range for this position is $147,000-$220,000 annually.

This position is eligible for equity in the form of RSUs.