Staff Software Engineer, Cortex AI Infrastructure

Staff Software Engineer - AI Products

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. ABOUT THE AI PRODUCTS TEAM The AI Products team is part of the broader Marketplace & Collaboration organization and is focused on bringing AI products on top of Snowflake’s data and application platform to help customers discover, share, monetize, and act on data assets & applications more easily. This team is building the connective tissue of the agentic enterprise: the infrastructure and product surfaces that allow Snowflake customers to seamlessly share datasets, semantic views, and applications, and make them discoverable and executable through Cortex Code, CoWork, and other agentic harnesses. Our strategy is centered on evolving Snowflake Marketplace for the AI era, including packaging data and intelligence into ready-to-use agentic experiences, and enabling governed access patterns that let AI systems safely operate on enterprise data and applications. AS A STAFF SOFTWARE ENGINEER ON AI PRODUCTS, YOU WILL * Lead the design and delivery of large, complex initiatives spanning multiple teams, turning ambiguous product and platform opportunities into durable technical solutions. * Shape the architecture for how datasets, applications, semantic assets, and agentic capabilities are shared, discovered, governed, and invoked across Snowflake surfaces and third-party agentic environments. * Define and evolve the APIs, metadata models, runtime discovery systems, and sharing protocols that make enterprise assets usable by AI agents and developer workflows. * Partner closely with product managers, designers, and platform teams to deliver high-impact customer experiences that raise the bar for AI-native collaboration on Snowflake. * Act as a technical owner for critical product areas with a strong focus on service health, quality, customer impact, reliability, and long-term maintainability. * Identify systemic issues affecting customer experience or engineering velocity and drive cross-team solutions that endure beyond a single launch or component. * Use sound engineering judgment to make trade-offs across product value, technical complexity, scalability, and strategic importance, with an eye toward Snowflake’s broader company goals. * Mentor other engineers, raise the quality bar in code and design reviews, and help develop technical expertise across the team. * Contribute hands-on across the stack as needed, from backend systems and APIs to user-facing product experiences, in service of shipping meaningful customer value. OUR IDEAL STAFF SOFTWARE ENGINEER WILL HAVE * 9+ years of professional software engineering experience, including ownership of large-scale production systems. * A track record of leading large projects or very complex cross-team efforts from problem definition through architecture, execution, and rollout. * Deep expertise in at least one core area such as distributed systems, data/application sharing, or AI-powered product surfaces, along with the ability to contribute outside their primary domain when the problem demands it. * Strong backend engineering skills in one or more of Java, Go, Python, or similar languages, plus enough product or frontend fluency to help shape end-to-end user experiences. * Experience designing APIs, service architectures, and platform abstractions that scale reliably and are easy for other teams to build on. * Demonstrated ability to work effectively in ambiguity, use data and analysis to drive decisions, and build alignment across engineering and cross-functional stakeholders. * Strong product and customer instincts, including the ability to anticipate future needs and translate them into technical plans. * Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including experience authoring technical roadmaps, design docs and driving technical discussions across teams. * BS/MS in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. BONUS POINTS FOR * Experience with agentic workflows, MCP servers, LLM integrations, semantic search, or AI-assisted product experiences. * Familiarity with marketplace, data-sharing, application platform, or ecosystem-style products. * Experience building governance, metadata, discovery, or catalog systems for enterprise platforms. WHY JOIN THIS TEAM This is a chance to shape how Snowflake customers expose data and applications to AI systems in a secure, governed, and highly usable way. The work sits at the intersection of platform engineering, product innovation, and AI transformation, and it directly influences how the Data Cloud evolves for the next generation of customers and builders. 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

Principal AI Software Engineer - Snowflake Intelligence

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. ABOUT THE ROLE The Cortex Apps team is defining the future of AI for enterprise data. Our mission is to transform how the world’s largest enterprises interact with their data through flagship products like Snowflake Intelligence. As a Principal AI Engineer, you will be a technical North Star for our AI initiatives. You won't just execute on a roadmap; you will help define it. You will tackle the most complex, "frontier" problems in agentic reasoning, NL-to-SQL, and enterprise-scale RAG, ensuring our AI products are not only innovative but fundamentally reliable and scalable for the Fortune 500. WHAT YOU WILL DO IN THIS ROLE: * Technical Strategy & Architecture: Define the long-term technical vision for Snowflake Intelligence. Lead the architectural design of multi-agent systems, complex tool-use frameworks, and self-correcting NL-to-SQL engines. * Drive Industry-Leading Reliability: Move beyond simple evals to build world-class, automated "hill-climbing" infrastructure. You will establish the methodology for how Snowflake measures and guarantees LLM performance across diverse customer schemas. * Cross-Functional Influence: Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to align AI capabilities with business goals. You will bridge the gap between Research (modeling) and Production (infra), ensuring the latest LLM breakthroughs are viable at Snowflake scale. * Ecosystem Thinking: Design extensible "context engineering" patterns—including advanced function calling and semantic layer integration—that can be leveraged by other Snowflake teams and external developers. * Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Act as a force multiplier. You will mentor Staff and Senior engineers, lead cross-functional "strike teams" on high-stakes projects, and foster a culture of technical excellence and rapid experimentation. REQUIREMENTS: * Experience: 10+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years specifically leading the deployment of LLM-based applications at massive scale. * Education: Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Computer Science, AI, or a related field. * Expertise: Deep, "under-the-hood" understanding of LLM orchestration. You should be an expert in prompt optimization, semantic modeling, and building robust guardrails for non-deterministic systems. * Systems Thinking: Proven track record of designing complex systems that integrate AI with traditional data stacks (SQL, Retrieval Systems, Semantic Layers). * Communication: Exceptional ability to communicate complex technical trade-offs to both executive leadership and ICs. You are as comfortable in a design doc as you are in a boardroom. * Proven Impact: You have previously held a "Principal" or equivalent high-level IC role, or have led the technical launch of a major AI product used by millions. ABOUT SNOWFLAKE Snowflake is the AI Data Cloud. We aren't just shipping "wrappers"; we are building the foundational intelligence layer for the world’s data. Join us as we scale Cortex, including Snowflake Intelligence, Cortex Agents, Analyst, and Search—to define the next decade of enterprise computing. 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

Principal /Staff AI Engineer - Cortex Code Agentic System

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. About the Role The Cortex Code team is building the future of coding agents for working with data. See our flagship product in action: Cortex Code in Action: Live Demos + AMA. As a Staff/Principal AI Engineer on Cortex Code , you will help define architect agent behavior at enterprise scale by building the agentic systems and methodology that make our users build cutting edge agentic systems that are efficient, repeatable, auditable, and shippable. You’ll partner with modeling, platform, and product leadership to turn customer pain into golden scenarios, metrics, and experiment loops that the whole team can trust. Responsibilities: * Agent strategy & systems: Own major pillars of the quality stack: tuning agent behavior to engage on next generation agentic coding tasks. * Hill-climb infrastructure: Design and evolve pipelines and tooling that support large-scale experimentation, error mining, and iteration on prompts/tools/workflows with clear before/after signals. * Deep analysis & prioritization: Lead postmortems on quality regressions; cluster failure modes; translate findings into a prioritized roadmap for engineering and modeling partners. * Cross-functional leadership: Align product, infra, and applied AI on what “good” means for critical customer workflows; mentor engineers and uplevel eval craft across the team. * Production-minded rigor: Ensure quality systems are dependable in practice—reproducible runs, stable datasets, versioning, and operational clarity when things drift. Requirements: * Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Statistics, or a related field. Master’s or higher preferred but not a requirement. * 10+ years of experience shipping AI/ML-backed software in production, including Staff-level ownership of technical direction, cross-team delivery, and mentoring. * Strong track record building and operating eval harnesses, measurement, and/or experimentation loops for LLM/agent systems—not only one-off benchmarks. * Proficiency in programming languages such as Python, TypeScript, Go (strong in at least two). * Exceptional communication skills: crisp write-ups, constructive debate, and ability to influence without authority across engineering and product. * (Optional) Experience with data engineering pipelines (dbt, Airflow), data modeling, data analysis, retrieval systems, and semantic layers is a plus. Nice to have * Deep experience with agentic coding tools (IDE agents, CLI agents) and intuition for model strengths, failure modes, and prompting limits. * Background in data engineering (dbt, Airflow), analytics, retrieval / RAG, or semantic layers—highly relevant for data-centric coding agents. * Prior work on LLM observability, safety/guardrails, or quality systems used as release gates in production. You may be a particularly good fit if you * Have built and owned complex quality + data pipelines—substantial state, branching logic, and operational requirements. * Thrive in high-intensity environments with short feedback loops and high standards for rigor. * Take ambiguous “quality is slipping” problems to completion: you care about clear metrics, reproducibility, and sustained improvement—not one-off score bumps. * Are a power user of modern coding agents and care about turning intuition into systematic measurement and team-wide practice. About Snowflake Snowflake is the AI Data Cloud trusted by the world's most innovative companies. We're shipping production-ready AI applications at scale and want you to join us in building the future of how businesses interact with their data through Cortex Code, Cortex agents, Cortex analyst, Cortex search. 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