Principal OLTP Architect: Low-Latency, Cloud DB

Snowflake; Menlo Park (CA); On-site; USD 210,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Snowflake is seeking a Principal Software Engineer 2 to define and drive the architecture for OLTP across Snowflake Postgres, Unistore and related infrastructure. You will lead critical architectural decisions across transactions, storage, replication and recovery, while shaping low-latency, highly available systems for agent-driven workloads.

You will guide cross-team engineering efforts, mentor engineers, and collaborate with product leaders and strategic customers to set technical direction

Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience building databases, distributed systems, storage systems or large-scale cloud infrastructure.
• Deep expertise in OLTP and database systems, including transactions, concurrency control, storage engines, indexing, query processing, replication, recovery and high availability.
• Strong PostgreSQL expertise is a strong advantage, but experience building other sophisticated transactional or distributed database systems is equally relevant.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the long-term technical architecture for OLTP across Snowflake Postgres, Unistore and the infrastructure they depend on.
• Lead major architectural decisions across transactions, storage, concurrency control, replication, recovery, query execution and database scalability.
• Shape the compute and storage architecture for low-latency, highly available transactional systems, including resource isolation, elasticity, networking, caching and container infrastructure.
• Build database primitives for agent-driven workloads, including fast creation of isolated transactional environments, checkpointing and rollback, and efficient lifecycle management.
• Define how agents safely read and modify operational state, with strong guarantees around consistency, recovery, access control and governance.
• Determine where PostgreSQL architecture and compatibility provide leverage and where alternative approaches can deliver meaningful advantages.
• Design for workloads where databases and transactional environments are created and operated programmatically at machine speed rather than primarily through human administration.
• Lead complex, cross-organizational engineering efforts and establish technical direction across multiple teams.
• Work closely with product leaders, senior engineering leadership, and strategic customers on the most important technical and product decisions.
• Raise the technical bar through architecture reviews, mentoring and hands-on leadership on the hardest systems problems.

Skills

PostgreSQL

C/C++

Rust

Job description

Snowflake is seeking a Principal Software Engineer 2 to define and drive the architecture for OLTP across Snowflake Postgres, Unistore and related infrastructure. You will lead critical architectural decisions across transactions, storage, replication and recovery, while shaping low-latency, highly available systems for agent-driven workloads.

You will guide cross-team engineering efforts, mentor engineers, and collaborate with product leaders and strategic customers to set technical direction