Principal AI-First Observability Architect

Snowflake; Menlo Park (CA); On-site; USD 264,000 - 380,000; Full time

Job summary

Snowflake seeks a Principal Software Engineer I for its Observability team to build an AI-driven platform that helps customers understand and resolve issues quickly as workloads grow. You will shape technical direction, own outcomes, and ship high-impact observability capabilities.

You will contribute across product and design teams, raise engineering standards, and mentor engineers while building scalable pipelines and open standards like OpenTelemetry.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of software engineering experience including technical leadership across backend, infrastructure, or data platforms.
• Experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Proficiency in a backend language such as Java, Go, or C++, and cloud experience.
• AI-first engineering mindset with ability to apply AI across the software lifecycle.
• Experience shipping products to external customers and guiding adoption.
• Strong written communication and mentoring abilities.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build distributed infrastructure for logs, metrics, traces, and events at high scale.
• Ship observability products from telemetry to dashboards and diagnostics with customer impact.
• Develop agentic AI-driven detection and diagnosis across the stack.
• Build AI-first capabilities and ensure security and reliability standards.
• Lead architecture through adoption with intuitive APIs and SDKs.
• Mentor engineers and influence cross-team decisions.

Skills

Distributed systems

Java

Go

C++

AWS/Azure/Google Cloud

AI-first engineering

Mentoring engineers

Education

BS or MS in Computer Science or related field

Tools

OpenTelemetry

Job description

Snowflake seeks a Principal Software Engineer I for its Observability team to build an AI-driven platform that helps customers understand and resolve issues quickly as workloads grow. You will shape technical direction, own outcomes, and ship high-impact observability capabilities.

You will contribute across product and design teams, raise engineering standards, and mentor engineers while building scalable pipelines and open standards like OpenTelemetry.