The costs of doing business at that scale disgusts the engineer, that's not going to be different in another city. This engineer is likely intelligent and has been at the company for a year so I have no doubt he has considered other opportunities within this company so yes I do think he should quit as soon as he has a plan. Many people in this thread think the asker is somehow unintelligent and a slacker. I'm answering assuming this eng is smart and eager to work but has internal turmoil.

I was at a FAANG company as well (Google, with extremely slow dev tool velocity), and I don't think he isn't intelligent. But there are workarounds of the official dev process.

I liked working on parts of search quality for example (or any data mining project), where most of the time (and the way to promotion) is spent on research, not software development. It means that 90% of the code we write don't have to be committed (code reviewed, tested, documented, going through the approval process), just the code that goes to production. The smartest colleague of mine spent a lot of time figuring out the root cause of data/search quality issues, and made the smallest possible change in the system to get his change through. It's an art in itself, and can make a lot of impact and lots of money to the company as well.