Principal Software Engineer I - Snowhouse Foundation

Snowflake; Menlo Park (CA); On-site; USD 264,000 - 379,500; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision insurance

401(k) retirement plan

Paid time off & holidays

Parental leave

Job summary

Snowflake is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to design and implement innovative distributed platforms. This role requires a minimum of 15 years of experience in distributed systems and software development in cloud environments like AWS, Azure, and GCP. You'll lead projects from inception to production and collaborate with various teams. The estimated salary range is $264,000 - $379,500 and the position includes benefits such as medical, dental, 401(k), and more.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience in distributed systems, with some in data warehouse/development.
• Strong track record of delivering large scale distributed systems.
• Extensive experience in cloud environments.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement highly available distributed platforms.
• Lead and drive projects from idea to production.
• Collaborate on end-to-end solutions.
• Provide technical leadership.

Skills

Distributed systems

Cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP)

Collaboration and communication skills

ML knowledge

Education

BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or related majors

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.

The Snowhouse Foundation team builds our globally distributed data warehouse. We manage a vast array of petabyte scale data sets that are continuously ingested, processed and replicated from across all Snowflake environments and external data sources. Snowhouse powers all of Snowflake’s core business, engineering and data science needs and provides customers with full visibility into their account activities, usage, and resource consumption from all their global environments. The team is investing in multiple critical areas, including a pipeline authoring platform, high performance/high efficiency data export, ingestion and data layout. Our team is also responsible for a fundamental product for Snowflake’s customers: the Snowflake system database/application that provides customers with all usage insights they need to reason about their global Snowflake footprint as well as 1st party business logic such as ML powered functions and Budgeting applications.

AS A PRINCIPAL SOFTWARE ENGINEER IN SNOWHOUSE FOUNDATION, YOU WILL:

• Design and implement innovative highly available distributed platforms and pipelines and enhance the overall Snowflake data infrastructure
• Lead and drive projects from idea formulation to design, implementation and successful productionization.
• Collaborate with product managers, architects, other engineering teams, data science organizations, business groups, on end to end solutions.
• Provide strong technical leadership to the team and partner teams.
• Enable the data science organization, business groups, engineering teams to build comprehensive analytics quickly and effectively.

OUR IDEAL CANDIDATE WILL HAVE:

• 15+ years of experience in distributed systems, some of which are in data warehouse or data infrastructure software development.
• Strong track record of delivering large scale and resilient distributed systems and services.
• Extensive and strong development experience in cloud environments, such as AWS, Azure, and GCP.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills.
• Experience in distributed systems and databases.
• Experience in ML is a plus.
• Strong hands‑on skills. Can dive deep into the complex system design and implementation when needed.
• BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or related majors, or equivalent experience.

Every Snowflake employee is expected to follow the company’s confidentiality and security standards for handling sensitive data. Snowflake employees must abide by the company’s data security plan as an essential part of their duties. It is every employee’s duty to keep customer information secure and confidential.

Benefits

• The estimated base salary range for this role is $264,000 - $379,500.
• Additionally, this role is eligible to participate in Snowflake’s bonus and equity plan.
• Other benefits include 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; and other company benefits.