Principal Performance Engineer, Cloud Infrastructure

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

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

Life insurance

Disability insurance

401(k)

Job summary

Snowflake in Menlo Park is seeking a Principal Performance Engineer to drive cloud infrastructure performance strategy, evaluating new hardware generations, building benchmarking and modeling pipelines, and translating results into pricing and rollout decisions.

You will mentor engineers, partner with CSPs, and shape the automation of day-zero hardware readiness while advancing a data-driven performance culture across the company.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience in performance engineering, systems engineering, or infra engineering.
• Deep cloud infra performance expertise across at least one major CSP (AWS/Azure/GCP).
• Strong hardware fundamentals: CPU microarchitecture, memory bandwidth, I/O subsystems.
• Experience building large-scale benchmarking systems and converting results to decisions.
• Ability to build quantitative models linking performance to business outcomes.
• Proven cross-functional leadership with external partners (CSPs, silicon vendors).
• Bias toward automation with scorecards, dashboards, and pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Own new hardware evaluation and enablement across major CSPs.
• Set performance strategy and architecture; translate benchmarks to rollout plans.
• Lead cross-functional partnerships with engineering and CSPs to validate hardware.
• Characterize hardware performance to identify bottlenecks and solutions.
• Develop price/performance models to support hardware transitions.
• Automate day-zero hardware readiness and create scorecards per provider.
• Grow the performance discipline through mentoring and education.

Skills

Performance engineering

Cloud infrastructure

Technical leadership

Cross-functional collaboration

Automation bias

Benchmarking systems

Pricing modeling

Tools

PMU counters

Profiling tools

Benchmarking frameworks

Job description

Snowflake in Menlo Park is seeking a Principal Performance Engineer to drive cloud infrastructure performance strategy, evaluating new hardware generations, building benchmarking and modeling pipelines, and translating results into pricing and rollout decisions.

You will mentor engineers, partner with CSPs, and shape the automation of day-zero hardware readiness while advancing a data-driven performance culture across the company.