About Snorkel
At Snorkel, we believe meaningful AI doesn’t start with the model, it starts with the data.
We’re on a mission to help enterprises transform expert knowledge into specialized AI at scale. The AI landscape has gone through incredible changes between 2015, when Snorkel started as a research project in the Stanford AI Lab, to the generative AI breakthroughs of today. But one thing has remained constant: the data you use to build AI is the key to achieving differentiation, high performance, and production-ready systems. We work with some of the world’s largest organizations to empower scientists, engineers, financial experts, product creators, journalists, and more to build custom AI with their data faster than ever before. Excited to help us redefine how AI is built? Apply to be the newest Snorkeler!
We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to define and drive the technical direction of our AI Platform. This is a role for someone who wants to operate at the nexus of distributed systems, LLM infrastructure, synthetic data, and agentic orchestration.
As a Principal Engineer, you will:
- Architect the core platform that powers synthetic data generation, agentic workflows, RL environments, and scalable LLM operations
- Build distributed systems that allow customers — and our own expert network — to generate datasets and evaluations at unprecedented scale
- Design and evolve the APIs, compute services, and orchestration layers that empower internal and customer-facing applications
- Collaborate across product, research, and engineering teams to define the long-term technical strategy of Snorkel
- Act as a technical leader, mentor, and culture-setter for the engineering organization
- Serve as a key advisor to company leadership while owning high-impact, highly ambiguous problem spaces
- Think years ahead about where AI is going — and help Snorkel build the infrastructure that gets us there
There is intentionally no narrow focus for this role. You will work across the stack, across teams, and across disciplines. You should be excited to take on the most complex and impactful engineering challenges in the company.
Today, our AI Platform team builds the scalable architecture that powers this mission. We develop the systems that allow global organizations to:
- Generate and refine synthetic data at massive scale
- Create and evaluate agentic systems that reason, act, and improve over time
- Provision RL training environments and simulation frameworks for next-generation AI agents
- Deploy robust benchmarks, datasets, and automated labeling pipelines to accelerate model development
- Run LLMs and multi-agent systems efficiently, reliably, and cost-effectively across cloud and hybrid environments
Our platform enables an ecosystem of expert contributors to create the datasets and evaluation environments that frontier models rely on to improve. We combine a decade of academic research with production-grade engineering to help customers build differentiated, high-performance AI systems faster than ever before.
Minimum Qualifications- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field
- 12+ years of experience building customer-facing, cloud-native software systems
- Deep experience with AI/ML pipelines, LLM-based systems, or agentic workflows
- Experience with distributed computing, large-scale data systems, or orchestration frameworks
- Experience at high-growth technology startups
- Experience building software products for large enterprise customers
- Expertise in Python and cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
- Strong understanding of production web-scale systems: monitoring, telemetry, reliability, performance, debugging, and triage
- Passion for mentorship, technical leadership, and elevating engineering cultur
- 15+ years of professional software engineering experience
- Experience designing platforms for machine learning, synthetic data generation, or reinforcement learning environments
- Experience with LLM infrastructure, API unification layers, distributed inference, or model-serving systems
- Experience with Typescript and React (for platform-oriented or internal tool development)
- Experience with engineering management or developing growth frameworks (career ladders, mentorship programs, upskilling initiatives)
Be Your Best at Snorkel
Joining Snorkel AI means becoming part of a company that has market proven solutions, robust funding, and is scaling rapidly—offering a unique combination of stability and the excitement of high growth. As a member of our team, you’ll have meaningful opportunities to shape priorities and initiatives, influence key strategic decisions, and directly impact our ongoing success. Whether you’re looking to deepen your technical expertise, explore leadership opportunities, or learn new skills across multiple functions, you’re fully supported in building your career in an environment designed for growth, learning, and shared success.
Snorkel AI is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer and is committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. Snorkel AI embraces diversity and provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment. Snorkel AI prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type on the basis of race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, performance, merit, and business need.
We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.
Top Skills
What We Do
Our mission is to empower everyone to solve their most impactful problems through data-centric AI. To do this, we have introduced Snorkel Flow, a data-centric AI platform, and are building an incredibly talented team. We empower Fortune 500 enterprises such as Chubb and BNY Mellon, and several government agencies to accelerate AI application development by 10-100x.
Why Work With Us
The founding team spent over half a decade researching programmatic labeling, weak supervision, and other techniques to break through one of the biggest bottlenecks in AI: the lack of labeled training data. This research has resulted in Snorkel research project and 60+ peer-reviewed publications. Snorkel has developed and deployed its technology
