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Software Engineer, Snap Inc.

Santa Monica, California · February 2024 – July 2026

Real-time multiplayer and AR infrastructure for Spectacles and Connected Lenses, a matchmaking service for 20M daily players, and the cloud platform behind them.

  • Real-time systems
  • Multiplayer infrastructure
  • Distributed systems
  • AWS
  • Google Cloud

Impact

  • Increased real-time messaging throughput 40x, from 250 to 10K+ messages per 5 seconds, by improving rate limiting, flow control, and the joining flow for Connected Lenses on Spectacles. The work led to a patent application and was showcased at Snap Partner Summit 2024.
  • Designed and developed the matchmaking service for microservices-based real-time multiplayer games serving 20M daily active users worldwide, enabling global player matching beyond the social graph.
  • Saved $250K annually in cloud costs by optimizing monitoring for existing multiplayer games: heartbeat presence checks, service migrations, and cron job changes.
  • Productionized the Lens Studio CLI Service on AWS EC2 macOS instances, enabling 440K+ lens creations annually and reducing build cadence 12x.
  • Led development of the Cloud Storage notification system, with a subscription system and Pub/Sub broadcasting, serving 10K+ concurrent users at 200ms median latency.
  • Released internal Polling RPC APIs for second-party developers, with an allowlisting and authorization layer and a custom integration module, generating $130K in direct revenue.

At Snap I worked on the multiplayer and AR infrastructure behind Spectacles and Connected Lenses, the systems that let several people see and manipulate the same AR scene at the same time. That requires shared state to converge across devices fast enough that the scene feels physically present to everyone in it, under mobile network conditions and on the power and thermal budget of a wearable.

Improving rate limiting, flow control, and the joining flow took Connected Lenses messaging from 250 to more than 10,000 messages per five seconds, a 40x increase. The work led to a patent application and was showcased at Snap Partner Summit 2024.

I also designed the matchmaking service that puts players together beyond their social graph, at a scale of 20 million daily active users, and worked on the platform around it: cutting $250K a year from cloud costs, building a Pub/Sub notification system for Cloud Storage, releasing internal Polling RPC APIs that brought in $130K in direct revenue, and productionizing the Lens Studio CLI Service behind 440K+ lens creations a year.

The data-structure work behind matchmaking queues is written up in Why Skip Lists Are the Wrong Default for Matchmaking Queues.

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