Principal Software Engineer I - Metadata

Snowflake; Bellevue (WA); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Snowflake is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to solve real business needs at large scale and develop scalable distributed systems. The ideal candidate will have 15+ years of experience, strong computer science fundamentals, and fluency in Java or similar languages.

Join Snowflake's engineering team to build an industry-leading Cloud Data and AI Platform, tackle challenging technical problems, and innovate closely with customers. A Bachelor's in Computer Science is required, with advanced degrees preferred.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of industry experience designing, building and supporting large-scale distributed services.
• Strong computer science fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems.
• Excellent understanding of operating systems concepts including multi-threading, memory management, networking and storage.

Responsibilities

• Solve real business needs at large scale by applying your software engineering and analytical skills.
• Design, develop and support fault-tolerant scalable distributed systems.
• Mentor and grow junior engineers.

Skills

Distributed systems design

Analytical problem solving

Mentoring junior engineers

Java or similar OOP language

Education

BS in Computer Science

Masters or PhD

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.

We are the Snowflake Metadata team. We own Snowflake’s metadata systems that make it easy for customers to query, modify and manage their petabyte-scale data. We develop distributed systems that store and maintain metadata, transaction frameworks that power Snowflake’s query and DML capabilities, asynchronous systems that provide time travel and lifecycle management capabilities and entity metadata supporting DDL capabilities. We also build foundational capabilities that deliver global features like cross-region replication (Snowgrid), data sharing, and data marketplace.

AS A PRINCIPAL SOFTWARE ENGINEER AT SNOWFLAKE YOU WILL:

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

• Design, develop and support fault-tolerant scalable distributed systems for our Snowgrid and Data Sharing teams.

• Create architecture and design, influence our product roadmap, and take ownership and responsibility over new projects.

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

• Mentor and grow junior engineers.

• Understand trade-offs between consistency, performance 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 durability, availability and performance.

OUR IDEAL PRINCIPAL SOFTWARE ENGINEER WILL HAVE:

• 15+ years of industry experience designing, building and supporting large‑scale distributed services.

• Strong computer science fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems.

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

• Fluency in Java or other similar procedural object‑oriented language is preferred.

• Track record of identifying and implementing creative solutions to complex problems.

• Ability to work effectively across engineering teams in multiple locations.

• BS in Computer Science; Masters or PhD Preferred.

WHY JOIN THE ENGINEERING TEAM AT SNOWFLAKE?

• Build an industry‑leading Cloud Data and AI 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.