Principal Software Engineer I

Snowflake is about empowering enterprises to achieve their full potential - and people too. With a culture that's all in on impact, innovation, and collaboration, Snowflake is the sweet spot for building big, moving fast, and taking technology - and careers - to the next level.

There is only one Data Cloud. Snowflake's founders started from scratch and designed a data platform built for the cloud that is effective, affordable, and accessible to all data users. But it didn't stop there. They engineered Snowflake to power the Data Cloud, where thousands of organizations unlock the value of their data with near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance. This is our vision: a world with endless insights to tackle the challenges and opportunities of today and reveal the possibilities of tomorrow.

We're hiring talented Principal Engineer that are passionate about using software-based approaches to solve complex challenges and automate those solutions. You'll be part of the cloud engineering organization where we have a strong focus on using engineering and software practices to manage and scale our cloud infrastructure. As part of the organization who owns the relationships with our Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) you will be building products that improve the scalability of Snowflake.

You'll understand the CSP roadmap and products, and lead initiatives aimed at infrastructure, process, systems, and automation to achieve better efficiency and reliability. You will also discover bottlenecks, limitations, and new feature requests that influence the cloud ecosystem of products directly.

Eventually, you will act as an architect between CSP and Snowflake services. You'll build a deep understanding of Snowflake's service and use that knowledge to optimize and evolve our infrastructure reliability, availability, serviceability, and profitability. As part of that you will contribute to building components of Virtual CSP (vCSP) layer, a cloud-agnostic approach to feature development within Snowflake. vCSP will help ease feature development to meet customers where they are-or want to be-faster than we do today.

You'll work with some of the brightest engineers on the planet. To be successful, you'll need to be technical and capable of holding your own with other strong peers. You possess excellent communication, collaboration, and diplomacy skills. You have software development fundamentals, systems knowledge, and troubleshooting abilities. Ideally, you're an expert on at least one major cloud provider and have experience practicing infrastructure-as-code.

If you love solving problems at scale, prefer to write scalable, reliable, and testable software, are an ace troubleshooter, and are deeply technical, then this is the role for you

• Introduce tools to facilitate greater automation and operability of services

• Architect, deploy, and scale observability infrastructure

• Participate in on-call rotation and ensure uptime of services

• Create runtime tools/processes that optimize cloud triaging and limit downtime

• Define best practices around making our systems and services measurable

• Work closely with our various teams to ensure those best practices get applied

• Utilize your deep experience and problem solving skills to help prevent and investigate production issues

• Plan and lead complicated technical projects that interact with a wide variety of teams within the company

• Take a data-first approach that helps define the investments of the world's largest cloud service providers

• 10-15 or more years experience with:

  • Cloud Computing (AWS, Azure, GCP, or others)

  • Containerization (Kubernetes, Docker/ContainerD)

  • Distributed Database systems (FoundationDB, Cassandra, MongoDB, etc.)

• Experience in programming in at least one or more of the following languages: Go, Python, Java, or C++

• Experience with Observability systems - Prometheus, Grafana, ELK etc

• Experience with Cloud Computing toolsets - Pulumi, Terraform, Vault, Packer etc

• Experience with Configuration Management/Orchestration tools (Ansible, SaltStack, Chef, Puppet)

• Firm grasp of TCP/IP networking and troubleshooting

• Tremendous attention to details and ability to build reliable and scalable software systems

• Effective communication and collaboration skills

• Solid interpersonal skills conducive to a team environment

• Able to debug, troubleshoot, and resolve complex technical issues

• Self-driven & motivated, with a strong work ethic and a passion for problem solving

• Experience and knowledge of Git, JIRA, and Jenkins a plus

• Bachelor's or Master Degree in Computer Science or related field

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

The following represents the expected range of compensation for this role:

• The estimated base salary range for this role is $243,000 - $379,500.
• Additionally, this role is eligible to participate in Snowflake's bonus and equity plan.

The successful candidate's starting salary will be determined based on permissible, non-discriminatory factors such as skills, experience, and geographic location. This role is also eligible for a competitive benefits package that includes: medical, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance; 401(k) retirement plan; flexible spending & health savings account; at least 12 paid holidays; paid time off; parental leave; employee assistance program; and other company benefits.

To comply with pay transparency requirements and other statutes, you can notify us if you believe that a job posting is not compliant by completing this form.