Staff Software Engineer - Container Platform

Staff Software Engineer - FDB Platform

Snowflake

At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise. To usher in this new era, we seek AI-native thinkers across every function who are energized by the opportunity to reinvent how they work. You don’t just use tools; you possess an innate curiosity, treating AI as a high-trust collaborator that is core to how you solve problems and accelerate your impact. We look for low-ego individuals who thrive in dynamic and fast-moving environments and move with an experimental mindset — who rapidly test emerging capabilities to discover simpler, more powerful ways to deliver results. At Snowflake, your role isn't just to execute a function, but to help redefine the future of how work gets done. Snowflake is a high-growth, cloud-native data platform company committed to empowering enterprises to achieve their full potential. With a culture built on impact, innovation, and collaboration, we offer an environment where you can build large-scale systems, move fast, and take your technology career to the next level. We are seeking an outstanding Staff Software Engineer with a passion for large scale databases and distributed systems to help us take the FDB platform to the next level. A massive new market opportunity is being created at the intersection of Cloud and Data, and the Snowflake Data Cloud is leading the way, all powered by the database engine we are building from the ground up. Key to Snowflake’s Database Engine is our large scale distributed transactional Key-Value store - called FDB - which powers all of Snowflake’s products and services and is rapidly evolving to meet Snowflake’s future needs. FDB runs on multiple cloud providers including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. The elastic infrastructure FDB runs on is being built from the ground up and is envisioned to be a cloud agnostic, fully automated manageability platform that provides: * Autoscaling and auto-balancing of clusters based on utilization, traffic and workloads * Auto-provisioning of new clusters with zero manual intervention * Self-healing capabilities that prevent, mitigate and resolve any production impact * Built-in configuration management that guarantees FDB runs correctly and on the intended topologies * Self-optimizing COGS efficiency, ensuring we run our clusters at optimal utilization AS A STAFF SOFTWARE ENGINEER AT SNOWFLAKE, YOU WILL: * Design and implement scalable distributed system solutions for our cloud agnostic platform. * Analyze fault-tolerance and high availability issues, performance and scale challenges, and solve them. * Own the end to end delivery of your projects, from identifying a solution, to design, implementation, test and safe production rollout * Understand trade-offs between consistency, durability and costs to build solutions which can meet the demands of rapidly growing services. * Build the next generation transaction system, caching, storage engine and multi tenant capabilities * Evangelize best practices in database usage and end-to-end architecture. * Pinpoint problems, instrument relevant components as needed, and ultimately implement solutions. OUR IDEAL STAFF SOFTWARE ENGINEER WILL HAVE: * 8+ years industry experience designing, building and supporting large scale infrastructure in production. * Experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems infrastructure supporting stateful services * Experience in container orchestration, cluster management, or autoscaling. * Excellent understanding of operating systems concepts including multi-threading, memory management, networking and storage, performance and scale. * Systems programming skills including multi-threading, concurrency, etc. Fluency in Java * Solid understanding of the internals of Kubernetes, Mesos, OpenShift, or other container platforms * Experience with scalable Key-Value stores such as FoundationDB, RocksDB/LevelDB, DynamoDB, Redis, etc. a plus. * Track record of delivering highly complex projects in the distributed systems space * Intense curiosity, willingness to question and passion for making systems better * Experience with one or more of the following highly desired: * Big Data storage technologies and their applications (HDFS, Cassandra, Columnar Databases, etc.) * Scalable Key-Value stores such as FoundationDB, RocksDB/LevelDB, DynamoDB, Redis, Cassandra, etc. * BS in Computer Science; Masters or PhD Preferred. Snowflake is growing fast, and we’re scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth. We are looking for people who share our values, challenge ordinary thinking, and push the pace of innovation while building a future for themselves and Snowflake. How do you want to make your impact? For jobs located in the United States, please visit the job posting on the Snowflake Careers Site for salary and benefits information: careers.snowflake.com

Staff Software Engineer - Applied Performance Group

Snowflake

At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise. To usher in this new era, we seek AI-native thinkers across every function who are energized by the opportunity to reinvent how they work. You don’t just use tools; you possess an innate curiosity, treating AI as a high-trust collaborator that is core to how you solve problems and accelerate your impact. We look for low-ego individuals who thrive in dynamic and fast-moving environments and move with an experimental mindset — who rapidly test emerging capabilities to discover simpler, more powerful ways to deliver results. At Snowflake, your role isn't just to execute a function, but to help redefine the future of how work gets done. The Applied Performance Group (APG) Engineering team provides a highly strategic function at Snowflake, with direct impact to our product direction, as well as to our bottom line. APG engineers are a key bridge between Engineering and our Sales organization, support organization, and other engineering organizations at Snowflake. They are called on to help with our most challenging customer performance issues, and help deliver some of our biggest deals. In addition, APG plays a strategic role in competitive benchmarking, defining and/or utilizing industry benchmarks to compare Snowflake performance against our competitors. APG Engineers are at the cutting edge of innovation at Snowflake, pioneering Snowflake deployments with the newest technology and working with Engineering and Product Management to continuously improve the product and ensure we continue building the best Cloud Data Platform in the industry. A successful Applied Performance Engineer will have a broad range of skills and experience ranging from strong SQL skills, data warehousing, data architecture, data engineering, transaction processing, security, performance analysis, analytics, etc. He/she will have the insight to make the connection between a customer’s specific business problems and Snowflake’s solution, the customer-facing skills to communicate that connection and vision to a wide variety of technical and executive audiences, and the technical skills to be able to not only build and execute proof-of-concepts and benchmarks, but also to provide consultative assistance in areas of product direction. The person we’re looking for shares our passion about reinventing the data platform and thrives in the dynamic environment. That means having the flexibility and willingness to jump in and get done what needs to be done to make Snowflake and our customers successful. It means keeping up to date on the ever-evolving technologies for data and analytics in order to be an authoritative resource for both Snowflake and customers. And it means working collaboratively with a broad range of people both inside and outside the company. RESPONSIBILITIES: * Be an expert on the topics of Snowflake architecture, query processing, workload profiling, data engineering, and Snowflake tools * Be an expert in competitor solutions/products for analytics and data engineering * Define, automate, execute, and publish competitive benchmarks * Partner closely with other engineering teams to deliver both results and guidance on performance gaps, challenges, advantages, and disadvantages * Collaborate with Product Management and Engineering to continuously improve Snowflake’s products and eco-system roadmaps. OUR IDEAL APPLIED PERFORMANCE ENGINEER WILL HAVE: * Minimum 5 years of experience in technical role delivering Database, Data Warehouse, or Data Engineering implementations and/or benchmark initiatives * Experience and ability to work directly with other engineering teams, product managers, and various levels of management * Strong communication skills, able to effectively communicate ideas and technical concepts to both technical and executive audiences * Broad understanding of cloud platforms and solutions, including experience and understanding of large-scale infrastructure-as-a-service platforms (e.g. Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack) * Proven track record of experience with Snowflake competitors * Deep understanding of complete data engineering and analytics stack and workflow, from data ingestion and load to transformation to data platform design to BI and analytics tools * Deep technical expertise in databases, data warehouses, data processing, and applications * Coding/programming experience in process automation * Strong SQL performance analysis experience, Python and/or Java expertise, and the ability to use tools to identify and articulate performance issues STRONGLY DESIRED: * Extensive knowledge of and experience with large-scale databases and distributed data processing technology (e.g. Databricks, Spark, Netezza, Oracle, Teradata, Greenplum, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, Microsoft Synapse, Postgres, Apache Spark, Ray, Dask, Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, etc.) * Software development experience with C/C++, Java, Scala, Spark * Scripting experience with Python, Ruby, Perl, Bash * Knowledge of and experience with AI and Machine Learning technologies either in use (eg. using a coding assistant), or in development (eg. using technologies like PyTorch for training and inference). * University degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics or related fields, or equivalent experience. Every Snowflake employee is expected to follow the company’s confidentiality and security standards for handling sensitive data. Snowflake employees must abide by the company’s data security plan as an essential part of their duties. It is every employee's duty to keep customer information secure and confidential. Snowflake is growing fast, and we’re scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth. We are looking for people who share our values, challenge ordinary thinking, and push the pace of innovation while building a future for themselves and Snowflake. How do you want to make your impact? For jobs located in the United States, please visit the job posting on the Snowflake Careers Site for salary and benefits information: careers.snowflake.com

Staff Software Engineer, Cortex AI Infrastructure

Snowflake

At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise. To usher in this new era, we seek AI-native thinkers across every function who are energized by the opportunity to reinvent how they work. You don’t just use tools; you possess an innate curiosity, treating AI as a high-trust collaborator that is core to how you solve problems and accelerate your impact. We look for low-ego individuals who thrive in dynamic and fast-moving environments and move with an experimental mindset — who rapidly test emerging capabilities to discover simpler, more powerful ways to deliver results. At Snowflake, your role isn't just to execute a function, but to help redefine the future of how work gets done. The Cortex Apps team is building the future of AI for enterprise data. This role focuses on the backend infrastructure that powers our flagship products like Snowflake Intelligence, Cortex Agents and Search making agentic AI fast, reliable, scalable and secure at the enterprise level. You won’t just be using AI tools; you will be building the high-performance systems that orchestrate them. You’ll own and influence the architecture for agent execution environments, high-throughput context retrieval, or the ecosystem that allows our customers to iterate and launch agents in production. WHAT YOU WILL DO IN THIS ROLE: * Architect Agentic Runtimes: Build and scale the orchestration engines that execute complex agentic workflows, ensuring low-latency tool execution and robust state management. * Scale Context Engineering Infra: Design high-performance systems for RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), including vector database integration, scalable and efficient search indexing, query processing, and result ranking, semantic caching, and automated metadata extraction. * Build the "Evals Engine": Develop the automated infrastructure required to run massive-scale golden set simulations, error analysis pipelines, and "hillclimbing" experiments. * Productionize AI Workflows: Collaborate with the modeling team to take raw LLM capabilities and turn them into hardened, multi-tenant microservices with strict guardrails and observability. * Optimize Performance & Cost: Direct the infra strategy for model routing, prompt caching, and token optimization to ensure Snowflake’s AI features are the most efficient in the industry. REQUIREMENTS: * Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field. * Experience: 5+ years of experience building distributed systems, high-throughput APIs, or backend infrastructure for AI/ML products. * Technical Stack: Deep proficiency in Go or Java (for systems) and Python (for AI orchestration). * Systems Thinking: Strong understanding of database internals, distributed state management, and cloud-native architecture (Kubernetes, FoundationDB, etc.). * Domain Expertise: Familiarity with the "plumbing" of AI: vector indices, agent platforms, and building scalable data pipelines. (BONUS) EXPERIENCE WITH: * Query optimization and SQL engine internals. * Designing multi-tenant systems that handle sensitive enterprise data at scale. * Developing search infrastructure for large-scale applications. * Direct experience with any of the subsystems outlined above. Every Snowflake employee is expected to follow the company’s confidentiality and security standards for handling sensitive data. Snowflake employees must abide by the company’s data security plan as an essential part of their duties. It is every employee’s duty to keep customer information secure and confidential. Snowflake is growing fast, and we’re scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth. We are looking for people who share our values, challenge ordinary thinking, and push the pace of innovation while building a future for themselves and Snowflake. How do you want to make your impact? For jobs located in the United States, please visit the job posting on the Snowflake Careers Site for salary and benefits information: careers.snowflake.com