Software Engineer, Cortex AI Infrastructure

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

Senior AI Engineer, Enterprise

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 TEAM The GTM AI Engineering team is part of Snowflake's Data Analytics & AI organization and builds the internal AI platform and intelligent applications that power Snowflake's Go-To-Market organization. We develop production-grade AI systems used daily by thousands of employees across Sales, Solution Engineering and Marketing. As a Senior AI Engineer, you will build the backend services, platform infrastructure, and AI capabilities that power next-generation agentic applications. You will work at the intersection of distributed systems, backend engineering, applied AI, and internal product development, designing scalable, reliable, and secure systems that enable intelligent experiences with direct business impact. This role offers the opportunity to shape a rapidly growing internal AI platform, establish engineering best practices, and build AI products that directly accelerate Snowflake's growth. IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL: * Design and build scalable backend services and distributed systems that power production AI and agentic applications. * Develop APIs, orchestration services, and platform capabilities for internal AI products. * Build reusable AI platform components, including agent frameworks, evaluation pipelines, developer SDKs, templates, and shared Python libraries. * Evolve our engineering platform through modern CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, deployment tooling, and developer experience improvements. * Optimize AI infrastructure and backend services for performance, scalability, reliability, security, and cost efficiency. * Leverage Snowflake Cortex, Snowpark, and the broader Snowflake AI ecosystem to build intelligent data applications. * Establish engineering best practices around testing, observability, monitoring, evaluation, and production readiness for AI systems. * Collaborate closely with product managers, data engineers, designers, and GTM stakeholders to deliver high-impact AI solutions. * Stay current with advances in AI engineering and help drive adoption of modern technologies, frameworks, and development practices across the team. WE WOULD LOVE TO HEAR FROM YOU IF YOU HAVE: REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS * 5+ years of professional software engineering experience with a Bachelor's degree (or higher) in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field. * Strong proficiency in Python (3.11+) with experience writing production-quality, well-tested, maintainable code using modern Python practices. * Experience building RESTful APIs and backend services using FastAPI or similar frameworks. * Experience designing and operating distributed systems and microservice architectures. * Strong understanding of software engineering best practices, including testing, CI/CD, code quality, observability, and production operations. * Experience with containerization technologies such as Docker. * Hands-on experience building production AI applications using large language models. * Experience with prompt engineering, tool calling, structured outputs, and LLM orchestration frameworks. * Strong problem-solving skills, excellent communication, and the ability to work effectively in a fast-paced, collaborative environment. PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS * Experience with the Snowflake platform, including Snowpark, Cortex AI, Snowpark Container Services, Snowflake Connector, and Snowflake CLI. * Experience building agentic applications using frameworks such as LangGraph or similar multi-agent orchestration frameworks. * Experience with AI evaluation, monitoring, guardrails, and observability frameworks. * Familiarity with model serving, inference optimization, and AI infrastructure. * Experience working with large-scale data platforms, ETL pipelines, and modern data engineering workflows. * Experience building full-stack AI applications using Streamlit, React, or similar frameworks. * Experience with Python data libraries such as pandas and NumPy. * Familiarity with modern AI development tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, Cortex Code, or similar AI-assisted development environments. * Experience working with cloud-native infrastructure and Kubernetes is a plus. WHY JOIN OUR TEAM? Joining the GTM AI Engineering team means building AI products that have a direct and measurable impact on Snowflake's business. You'll help define the architecture of our internal AI platform while developing intelligent applications used every day by thousands of employees across our global Go-To-Market organization. This is a unique opportunity to combine backend engineering, distributed systems, and applied AI to solve real business problems at scale. You'll work alongside world-class engineers and product leaders while helping shape how AI transforms the way Snowflake operates internally. If you're passionate about building production-grade AI systems, enjoy solving complex engineering challenges, and want to help define the future of enterprise AI, we'd love to hear from you. 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