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 - Snowhouse Foundation
About the Team
The Snowhouse Foundation team builds our globally distributed data warehouse, managing vast petabyte-scale datasets that are continuously ingested, processed, and replicated across all Snowflake environments and external data sources. Snowhouse powers Snowflake's core business, engineering, and data science operations while delivering critical customer visibility into global account activities, usage, and resource consumption. The team drives critical investments in core data processing infrastructure, high-performance data export/ingestion, optimized data layout and compliance, and Snowflake's system database and applications.
A successful candidate will:
Deeply understand the inner workings of Snowflake and the needs of our users, exhibiting a healthy curiosity for use cases and needs that will inform future technical strategy, anticipating needs rather than reacting to them.
Be highly productive by leveraging AI-assisted engineering, empowering and creating opportunities for others, and effectively leading at scale.
Show a natural inclination to partner across teams to deliver improvements on cross-team concerns such as reliability and efficiency.
Responsibilities
Technical Leadership: Provide hands-on guidance and code reviews, develop other engineers and raise the quality bar, establish engineering best practices across the team and contribute to the team strategy and future of the platform.
Technical Execution: Design and implement highly available distributed platforms, pipelines, and data infrastructure components to scale global data processing. Solve hard problems, use AI-assisted engineering responsibly to improve velocity and quality.
Problem-space Ownership: Lead cross-functional engineering projects from idea inception through implementation and production deployment across multiple quarters and teams. Develop a deep understanding of the underlying user and company needs.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with product managers, senior ICs, data science teams, and business units to deliver end-to-end data platform capabilities.
Platform Ownership: Own or co-own the reliability, observability, SLOs, capacity, and durable remediation goals for their problem space.
Qualifications
Experience: 12+ years of software development experience in distributed systems, with a strong focus on data warehouse or data infrastructure engineering.
Cloud Infrastructure: Deep experience developing resilient, large-scale services in public cloud environments (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
Technical Depth: Demonstrated proficiency in distributed systems architecture and database fundamentals, with a track record of solving complex system design challenges.
Communication: Excellent technical communication and collaborative problem-solving skills across multidisciplinary teams.
Bonus Skills: Familiarity with data or ML orchestration systems across diverse architectures.
Education: BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience).
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
Skills Required
- 12+ years of software development experience in distributed systems, focused on data warehouse or data infrastructure engineering
- Deep experience developing resilient, large-scale services in public cloud environments such as AWS, Azure, or GCP
- Proficiency in distributed systems architecture and database fundamentals
- Track record of solving complex system design challenges
- Excellent technical communication and collaborative problem-solving skills across multidisciplinary teams
- BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
- Familiarity with data or ML orchestration systems across diverse architectures
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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