Principal Software Engineer

Snowflake; Menlo Park (CA); On-site; USD 250,000 - 380,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

401(k) plan

HSA/FSA

12 paid holidays

Paid time off

Parental leave

Employee assistance program

Job summary

Snowflake is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to design AI-first platforms and improve developer productivity for Snowsight. You will architect scalable tooling, drive 10x increases in efficiency, and collaborate across teams to deliver high-quality, observable systems.

With 12+ years in large codebase tooling and a passion for AI-first approaches, you will mentor engineers and shape platform reliability, ensuring maintainable and safe systems while advancing Snowflake’s enterprise-grade

Qualifications

• 12+ years of industry experience building tools for large codebases.
• Strong background in AI-first processes and scalable platform design.
• Experience with or interest in AI/LLM-based applications (agents, evals, tooling).
• Experience with enterprise-grade build systems.

Responsibilities

• Design and build AI-first platforms, tools, and best practices to enhance developer experience for Snowsight.
• Drive strategy to improve agentic development workflows and scalability of developer productivity.
• Improve platform reliability via observability, SLOs, and automated remediation.
• Collaborate with product managers, architects, and other engineering teams on end-to-end solutions.
• Contribute to engineering processes, tooling, and standards.

Skills

Developer productivity

12+ years experience

AI-first platforms

Go/Java/Python

CS fundamentals

Mentoring junior engineers

English communication

Job description

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.

About The Team

The Apps & Experiences (AppEx) organization powers the unified user experience (Snowsight) for Snowflake. Every major Snowflake customer interacts with our platform through these surfaces, making AppEx central to both customer satisfaction and revenue growth.

Within Appex, our team sits at the intersection of AI, platform, and user experience. We are on a mission to create an AI‑first, scalable, maintainable, and extensible platform to build all Snowflake user experience features. The team owns:

• The serving layer that powers Snowsight, Snowflake CoWork, and UX features
• Developer tooling that enable our engineers to move fast and deliver
• Frontend infrastructure and shared services for product teams
• CI pipelines that ensure fast and reliable builds
• Testing and validation platform that maintains code and product quality
• The monitoring and logging stack that ensures observability and trust

What You Will Do

As a software engineer on the team, you will play a central role in delivering the next generation of tools and evolve our developer infrastructure and tooling to be scalable, highly performant, and AI-first.

• Design and build AI-first platforms, tools, and best practices to significantly enhance the developer experience for Snowsight
• Drive strategy and initiatives to improve agentic development workflows and build infrastructure to support 10x increases in developer productivity
• Improve platform reliability by investing in observability, alerting, SLOs, and automated remediation across our systems.
• Collaborate with product managers, architects, other engineering teams, and business groups, to drive end-to-end solutions.
• Contribute to improving our engineering processes, tooling, and standards.

What We’re Looking For

Our ideal Principal Software Engineer will have:

• Strong passion for making developers highly productive.
• 12+ years industry experience developing tools for large codebases.
• Passion for AI-first processes and for building platforms that enable many teams to move faster while keeping systems maintainable and safe.
• Experience with or strong interest in AI or LLM-based applications (agents, prompt/tool engineering, evals, or productionized AI features)
• Experience working on enterprise-grade build systems.
• Excellent problem solving skills, and strong CS fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems.
• Fluency in Go, Java, or Python.
• Ability to work in a team environment, collaborate well, and mentor junior engineers.
• A strategic mindset and strong sense of what to prioritize for maximum impact.
• Excellent interpersonal communication skills.
• Outstanding written and oral English language skills
• Ability to work on-site at our Bellevue, WA or Menlo Park, CA offices.

If you’re excited about building the platform and AI systems that power how the world’s largest companies experience Snowflake, we’d love to hear from you.

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 $250,000 - $380,000.
• 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
• other company benefits

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