Job Overview
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.
As a Principal Engineer on the Data Platform team, you will be a technical anchor — setting direction, solving the hardest engineering problems, and elevating the entire team. You will work at the intersection of systems design, long-term architecture, and real-world engineering execution. In this specific role, you will lead the evolution of our declarative data pipelines, focusing on streaming ingestion and transformations.
What You'll Do • Drive the technical strategy and architecture for key Data Platform initiatives, focusing heavily on real-time data movement and incremental processing.
- Lead design reviews and set engineering standards across teams.
- Identify and resolve high-impact technical challenges and systemic bottlenecks to reduce latency and improve the efficiency of dynamic tables at cloud scale.
- Mentor and grow senior engineers; raise the engineering bar.
- Partner closely with product and infrastructure leadership on roadmap and direction.
- Continuous hands-on technical deliverables in the most critical areas.
What We're Looking For • 14+ years of software engineering experience with deep expertise in distributed systems.
- Demonstrated track record of defining and delivering platform-scale technical initiatives.
- Expert-level knowledge of streaming and/or batch data systems (Flink, Spark, or equivalent), with specialized knowledge in incremental materialization algorithms.
- Strong systems thinking — ability to reason across layers of complexity (infra, storage, compute, API).
- A passion for engaging directly with customers to gain insight and inspiration
- Experience influencing technical direction across organizations
- Excellent written and verbal communication for technical and executive audiences.
Desirable • Experience with AI-augmented development practices and integrating LLM-based tooling into engineering workflows.
- Familiarity with Snowflake platform internals or cloud-native data systems.
- Experience with metadata systems, query optimization, or data catalog infrastructure.
- Contributions to open source, such as top-level Apache projects
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, challeng