Staff Software Engineer - AI Products

Snowflake; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Snowflake is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for AI Products to lead multi-team initiatives and shape cross-functional architecture. You will define APIs and runtime discovery for enterprise data/assets, while guiding teams toward reliable, scalable AI-enabled experiences.

You will mentor engineers, collaborate with product and platform teams, and contribute hands-on across the stack to ship meaningful customer value at scale.

Qualifications

• 9+ years of professional software engineering experience, including ownership of large-scale production systems.
• Track record of leading large projects or very complex cross-team efforts from problem definition through architecture, execution, and rollout.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, data sharing, or AI-powered product surfaces with ability to collaborate beyond primary domain.
• Strong backend skills in Java, Go, Python, or similar languages with frontend/UX fluency for end-to-end experiences.
• Experience designing APIs, service architectures, and platform abstractions that scale reliably.
• Comfort working in ambiguity, using data to drive decisions and align stakeholders across teams.
• Strong product/customer instincts and ability to translate needs into technical plans.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including roadmaps and design docs.
• BS/MS in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and delivery of large, complex initiatives spanning multiple teams, turning ambiguous product and platform opportunities into durable technical solutions.
• Shape the architecture for how datasets, applications, semantic assets, and agentic capabilities are shared, discovered, governed, and invoked across Snowflake surfaces and third-party agentic environments.
• Define and evolve the APIs, metadata models, runtime discovery systems, and sharing protocols that make enterprise assets usable by AI agents and developer workflows.
• Partner closely with product managers, designers, and platform teams to deliver high-impact customer experiences that raise the bar for AI-native collaboration on Snowflake.
• Act as a technical owner for critical product areas with a strong focus on service health, quality, customer impact, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
• Identify systemic issues affecting customer experience or engineering velocity and drive cross-team solutions that endure beyond a single launch or component.
• Use sound engineering judgment to make trade-offs across product value, technical complexity, scalability, and strategic importance, with an eye toward Snowflake’s broader company goals.
• Mentor other engineers, raise the quality bar in code and design reviews, and help develop technical expertise across the team.
• Contribute hands-on across the stack as needed, from backend systems and APIs to user-facing product experiences, in service of shipping meaningful customer value.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend engineering

API design

Go / Java / Python

Cross-team leadership

Mentoring engineers

Technical communication

Problem solving

Education

BS/MS in Computer Science

Equivalent practical experience

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 AI Products team

The AI Products team is part of the broader Marketplace & Collaboration organization and is focused on bringing AI products on top of Snowflake’s data and application platform to help customers discover, share, monetize, and act on data assets & applications more easily.

This team is building the connective tissue of the agentic enterprise: the infrastructure and product surfaces that allow Snowflake customers to seamlessly share datasets, semantic views, and applications, and make them discoverable and executable through Cortex Code, CoWork, and other agentic harnesses.

Our strategy is centered on evolving Snowflake Marketplace for the AI era, including packaging data and intelligence into ready-to-use agentic experiences, and enabling governed access patterns that let AI systems safely operate on enterprise data and applications.

As a Staff Software Engineer on AI Products, you will

• Lead the design and delivery of large, complex initiatives spanning multiple teams, turning ambiguous product and platform opportunities into durable technical solutions.

• Shape the architecture for how datasets, applications, semantic assets, and agentic capabilities are shared, discovered, governed, and invoked across Snowflake surfaces and third-party agentic environments.

• Define and evolve the APIs, metadata models, runtime discovery systems, and sharing protocols that make enterprise assets usable by AI agents and developer workflows.

• Partner closely with product managers, designers, and platform teams to deliver high-impact customer experiences that raise the bar for AI-native collaboration on Snowflake.

• Act as a technical owner for critical product areas with a strong focus on service health, quality, customer impact, reliability, and long-term maintainability.

• Identify systemic issues affecting customer experience or engineering velocity and drive cross-team solutions that endure beyond a single launch or component.

• Use sound engineering judgment to make trade-offs across product value, technical complexity, scalability, and strategic importance, with an eye toward Snowflake’s broader company goals.

• Mentor other engineers, raise the quality bar in code and design reviews, and help develop technical expertise across the team.

• Contribute hands-on across the stack as needed, from backend systems and APIs to user-facing product experiences, in service of shipping meaningful customer value.

Our ideal Staff Software Engineer will have

• 9+ years of professional software engineering experience, including ownership of large-scale production systems.

• A track record of leading large projects or very complex cross-team efforts from problem definition through architecture, execution, and rollout.

• Deep expertise in at least one core area such as distributed systems, data/application sharing, or AI-powered product surfaces, along with the ability to contribute outside their primary domain when the problem demands it.

• Strong backend engineering skills in one or more of Java, Go, Python, or similar languages, plus enough product or frontend fluency to help shape end-to-end user experiences.

• Experience designing APIs, service architectures, and platform abstractions that scale reliably and are easy for other teams to build on.

• Demonstrated ability to work effectively in ambiguity, use data and analysis to drive decisions, and build alignment across engineering and cross-functional stakeholders.

• Strong product and customer instincts, including the ability to anticipate future needs and translate them into technical plans.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including experience authoring technical roadmaps, design docs and driving technical discussions across teams.

• BS/MS in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Bonus points for

• Experience with agentic workflows, MCP servers, LLM integrations, semantic search, or AI-assisted product experiences.

• Familiarity with marketplace, data-sharing, application platform, or ecosystem-style products.

• Experience building governance, metadata, discovery, or catalog systems for enterprise platforms.

Why join this team

This is a chance to shape how Snowflake customers expose data and applications to AI systems in a secure, governed, and highly usable way. The work sits at the intersection of platform engineering, product innovation, and AI transformation, and it directly influences how the Data Cloud evolves for the next generation of customers and builders.

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