Principal Software Engineer - Elastic Global Services

Snowflake; Menlo Park (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Snowflake in Menlo Park seeks a Principal Software Engineer to design and build scalable distributed cloud services. You will solve real business problems at large scale, mentor junior engineers, and improve fault tolerance and performance across our data platform.

You will work on container orchestration, cluster management, and autoscaling, with deep OS knowledge and expertise in Kubernetes-like systems. Join a world-class team driving Snowflake's infrastructure ahead of the next wave of data

Qualifications

• 15+ years of industry experience designing, building and supporting large scale infrastructure in production.
• Experience building large scale distributed fault tolerant infrastructure.
• Experience in container orchestration, cluster management, or autoscaling.
• Excellent understanding of operating systems concepts including multi-threading, memory management, networking and storage, performance and scale.
• Solid understanding of the internals of Kubernetes, Mesos, OpenShift, or other container platforms.

Responsibilities

• Solving real business needs at large scale by applying your software engineering and analytical problem solving skills.
• Design and implement scalable distributed systems for our cloud services.
• Analyze fault-tolerance and high availability issues, performance and scale challenges, and solve them.
• Mentor and grow junior engineers.
• Understand trade-offs between consistency, durability and costs to build solutions which can meet the demands of rapidly growing services.
• Ensure operational readiness of the services and meet the commitments to our customers regarding availability and performance.

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.

Elastic Global Services team is responsible for building the highly available, scalable, multi-tenant “Cloud Services” platform that underpin Snowflake services. Areas we work on include, the autoscaling of VMs from cloud providers, managing topologies of our compute clusters, cluster management, workload orchestration and many others. We are looking at expanding our team to handle the next big challenges for Snowflake customers.

Our product offering runs on multiple cloud providers including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Our infrastructure self-optimizes, provides high availability and data protection across cloud providers so our users can focus on using their data, not managing it. In our effort to enable our Data Cloud vision, we are actively hiring talented distributed systems engineers. This role is a unique opportunity to make a significant impact on our elastic, large scale, high-performance computing environment.

To learn more about the team’s tech stack, see our recent talk at ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing! https://acmsocc.org/2022/assets/slides/99.pdf

AS A PRINCIPAL SOFTWARE ENGINEER AT SNOWFLAKE YOU WILL:

• Solving real business needs at large scale by applying your software engineering and analytical problem solving skills.

• Design and implement scalable distributed systems for our cloud services.

• Analyze fault-tolerance and high availability issues, performance and scale challenges, and solve them.

• Mentor and grow junior engineers.

• Understand trade-offs between consistency, durability and costs to build solutions which can meet the demands of rapidly growing services.

• Ensure operational readiness of the services and meet the commitments to our customers regarding availability and performance.

OUR IDEAL DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS ENGINEER WILL HAVE:

• 15+ years of industry experience designing, building and supporting large scale infrastructure in production.

• Experience building large scale distributed fault tolerant infrastructure.

• Experience in container orchestration, cluster management, or autoscaling.

• Excellent understanding of operating systems concepts including. multi-threading, memory management, networking and storage, performance and scale.

• Solid understanding of the internals of Kubernetes, Mesos, OpenShift, or other container platforms.

WHY JOIN THE ENGINEERING TEAM AT SNOWFLAKE?

• Build an industry-leading Cloud Data Platform.

• Solve challenging technical problems related to security, parallel and distributed systems, programming, resource management, large-scale system maintenance, and more!

• Work closely with our customers & partners, understand their use cases & needs, think strategically to seek the right problem to solve at the right time, and innovate with rigor.

• Join a world-class team of both industry veterans and rising stars.

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