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 App Runtime team is building a platform that lets every Snowflake user go from an idea to a live, deployed web application (Node.js first) in minutes. We own the end-to-end experience of building and running apps, from Cortex AI-assisted development to deployment in a secure, scalable infrastructure. Apps built on the platform inherit Snowflake's security, governance, lineage, and access controls by default. See Deploy Faster with Snowflake Apps.
As a Staff/Principal Engineer, you will shape the product and its architecture. It’s a high leverage role - you will lead a team to scale and harden an early-stage, public-preview product. Your decisions will have a long-lasting impact on the future of Snowflake as an app platform. This role requires a unique combination of deep hands-on expertise in scalability, performance and security, great product instincts, customer obsession and the organizational influence to drive cross-team programs.
Responsibilities
Own the roadmap and technical decisions to evolve the public-preview platform into a production-grade one, adding features like horizontal scaling, cost efficiency via suspend/resume, support for stacks beyond Node.js, and stronger access and data-governance controls
Stay deeply hands-on by authoring specs and implementing critical code across components from runtime infrastructure and the governance model to coding agents and user interfaces; lead by example
Serve as the primary technical representative for App Runtime internally and externally
Partner directly with customers, i.e. developers building Snowflake Apps, converting their needs to roadmap priorities
Grow the team by setting a high engineering bar and incubating the next generation of technical leaders
Align with adjacent teams like Container Platform, Networking, Cortex AI, Security and Snowsight on shared goals
Requirements:
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field. Master’s or higher is preferred but not a requirement
10+ years of experience, with a demonstrated track record of architecting, shipping and operating high-scale, container-based (e.g. Kubernetes) platforms, including staff-level ownership of technical direction, cross-team delivery, and mentoring
Proficiency in programming languages, such as Java, Python, TypeScript or Go (strong in backend and familiar with modern web stacks like Node.js), applied in distributed environments where security, reliability and performance are critical
Exceptional communication skills: crisp write-ups, constructive debate, and ability to influence without authority across engineering and product
Nice to have:
You led delivery of 0-1 products where you skillfully balanced the trade-offs between feature completeness and time-to-market
You have hands-on experience designing and evolving developer-facing SDKs and APIs
You designed multi-tenant systems (ideally app hosting platforms or tooling for developers) with strong isolation and a security-first posture
You keep yourself and engineers around you accountable for measurable outcomes
Your designs consider software holistically, from the hardware infrastructure to the client-side performance in the browser
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
Skills Required
- 2+ years hands-on software development experience
- significant experience in backend software development
- Deep understanding of distributed design architecture
- Good API design patterns
- Knowledge of data development tools or infrastructure
Snowflake Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Snowflake and has not been reviewed or approved by Snowflake.
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Fair & Transparent Compensation — Pay is often characterized as top‑of‑market across multiple roles. The company also points to a Fair Pay Workplace certification, signaling externally reviewed pay‑equity practices.
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Equity Value & Accessibility — Equity is a meaningful part of total compensation, with new‑hire grants, refresh potential, and a discounted ESPP with a favorable lookback. Feedback suggests this ownership component materially boosts perceived total rewards.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Parental leave is described as up to 26 weeks paid in the U.S., paired with flexible or generous PTO and multiple leave types. Family‑building benefits and a dedicated parental‑leave hub further expand support.
Snowflake Insights
What We Do
Snowflake powers the end-to-end data lifecycle – from ingesting and processing data to analyzing and modeling it, to building and sharing data and AI applications – helping engineers, analysts, and leaders innovate faster and achieve more with their data. We're on a mission to empower every enterprise to achieve its full potential through data and AI.
Why Work With Us
Snowflake is where data does more, and so do you. More innovating, more growing, and more collaborating. Here, you’ll find the sweet spot between building big and moving fast, in technology and your career.
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