Senior Software Engineer - Cortex AI - FDE

Snowflake; Menlo Park (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 270,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical Insurance

Dental Insurance

Vision Insurance

Life Insurance

Disability Insurance

401(k) Plan

Flexible Spending Account

Health Savings Account

Paid Holidays

Paid Time Off

Parental Leave

Employee Assistance Program

Job summary

Snowflake is seeking AI-native thinkers to reinvent how work gets done. You will shape backend infrastructure powering Snowflake Intelligence and Cortex Agents, building high-performance systems to orchestrate AI tools in production.

You’ll own architecture for agent execution environments, scalable context retrieval, and the ecosystem enabling customers to run agents at scale. Strong backend focus with cross-functional collaboration is essential.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in a technical field required.
• 7+ years building distributed systems or backend infrastructure for AI/ML products.
• Proficiency in Go/Java for systems and Python for orchestration.
• Strong understanding of cloud-native architecture and distributed state management.
• Experience in customer-facing technical roles and communicating complex issues clearly.
• Good product instinct and ability to distinguish bespoke vs platform-wide problems.
• Ability to trace requests across services and debug unfamiliar code from logs.

Responsibilities

• Architect Agentic Runtimes and scale orchestration engines.
• Scale Context Engineering Infra for RAG, vector indices, search and metadata extraction.
• Build the automated Evals Engine for large-scale simulations and experiments.
• Productionize AI Workflows as multi-tenant microservices with guardrails.
• Optimize model routing, prompt caching, and cost for Snowflake’s AI features.

Skills

Go

Java

Python

Distributed systems

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science

Tools

Kubernetes

FoundationDB

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 Cortex Apps team is building the future of AI for enterprise data. This role focuses on the backend infrastructure that powers our flagship products like Snowflake Intelligence, Cortex Agents and Search making agentic AI fast, reliable, scalable and secure at the enterprise level.

You won’t just be using AI tools; you will be building the high-performance systems that orchestrate them. You’ll own and influence the architecture for agent execution environments, high-throughput context retrieval, or the ecosystem that allows our customers to iterate and launch agents in production.

What you will do in this role:

• Architect Agentic Runtimes: Build and scale the orchestration engines that execute complex agentic workflows, ensuring low-latency tool execution and robust state management.
• Scale Context Engineering Infra: Design high-performance systems for RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), including vector database integration, scalable and efficient search indexing, query processing, and result ranking, semantic caching, and automated metadata extraction.
• Build the "Evals Engine": Develop the automated infrastructure required to run massive-scale golden set simulations, error analysis pipelines, and "hillclimbing" experiments.
• Productionize AI Workflows: Collaborate with the modeling team to take raw LLM capabilities and turn them into hardened, multi-tenant microservices with strict guardrails and observability.
• Optimize Performance & Cost: Direct the infra strategy for model routing, prompt caching, and token optimization to ensure Snowflake’s AI features are the most efficient in the industry.

Requirements:

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field.
• Experience: 7+ years of experience building distributed systems, high-throughput APIs, or backend infrastructure for AI/ML products.
• Technical Stack: Deep proficiency in Go or Java (for systems) and Python (for AI orchestration).
• Systems Thinking: Strong understanding of database internals, distributed state management, and cloud-native architecture (Kubernetes, FoundationDB, etc.).
• Domain Expertise: Familiarity with the "plumbing" of AI: vector indices, agent platforms, and building scalable data pipelines.
• Experience in a customer-facing technical role — you have explained a hard failure to a frustrated external audience and been believed, you can produce both the internal analysis and the customer-safe version.
• Product instinct — you can judge whether one customer's problem is bespoke or a platform gap worth fixing for everyone. This is the core judgment call.
• Cross-layer debugging — tracing a request across services and root-causing in unfamiliar code from logs and telemetry, not guesswork.
• Eval frameworks for LLM/agent systems — defining quality metrics and using evals to improve quality systematically over time.
• Comfort with ambiguity on open-ended, externally-driven problems.

(Bonus) Experience with:

• Query optimization and SQL engine internals.
• Designing multi-tenant systems that handle sensitive enterprise data at scale.
• Developing search infrastructure for large-scale applications.
• Direct experience with any of the subsystems outlined above.

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 200,000-270,000.
• 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; and other company benefits.

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