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.
Staff Software Engineer – Metadata
Company PitchSnowflake is the AI Data Cloud. Thousands of organizations run their most critical data, analytics, and AI workloads on our platform. We built Snowflake for the cloud from day one: near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance. Our goal is to make every organization's data instantly useful and always available.
Team PitchThe Metadata team owns the brain of Snowflake. Every query, table, transaction, and permission depends on the metadata layer we build. Our systems handle millions of metadata operations per second. We also power cross-region and cross-cloud replication and failover, keeping customer data available through outages. If you want hard distributed-systems problems with direct customer impact, this is the team.
ResponsibilitiesLead the design of core metadata and replication systems across multiple teams.
Set technical direction for scalability, consistency, and fault tolerance of the metadata layer.
Drive cross-region and cross-cloud replication toward lower RPO and higher reliability.
Solve hard problems in performance, availability, and correctness at global scale.
Partner with Product and architects to turn customer needs into durable designs.
Raise the operational bar through observability, safe rollouts, and blast-radius controls.
Mentor senior engineers and grow technical leaders on the team.
Core Requirements:
10+ years building large-scale distributed systems or database internals.
Strong development skills in Java or C++.
Proven record leading multi-team technical initiatives from design to production.
Deep understanding of consistency, transactions, and fault tolerance.
BS/MS in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience.
Any of the following would make you a stronger candidate:
Experience with FoundationDB or other distributed key-value stores.
Experience building replication, disaster recovery, or geo-distributed systems.
Experience with database metadata, catalogs, or query compilation.
Experience running services on AWS, Azure, or GCP.
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
- 10+ years building large-scale distributed systems or database internals
- Strong development skills in Java or C++
- Proven record leading multi-team technical initiatives from design to production
- Deep understanding of consistency, transactions, and fault tolerance
- BS/MS in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience
- Experience with FoundationDB or other distributed key-value stores
- Experience building replication, disaster recovery, or geo-distributed systems
- Experience with database metadata, catalogs, or query compilation
- Experience running services on AWS, Azure, or GCP
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 widely viewed as competitive and aligned with market value, with “fair pay” and top-tier total compensation frequently cited for engineering and technical roles.
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Equity Value & Accessibility — Equity and ESPP participation are standout components of total compensation, with robust RSU grants often highlighted as a major advantage, particularly in engineering.
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Healthcare Strength — Health coverage is described as strong and comprehensive, complemented by wellness resources and related programs.
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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