Staff Software Engineer, Cortex AI Search Infrastructure

Rounx Limited; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Snowflake is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the Cortex AI Search Infrastructure team, building high-performance retrieval engines for Cortex products like CoWork, Cortex Code, and Cortex Agents. The role focuses on designing scalable systems for RAG, semantic indexing, and vector search in a cloud-native environment.

The ideal candidate has 9+ years in distributed systems or backend AI infrastructure, with deep proficiency in Go or Java and Python.

Qualifications

• Minimum 9+ years in distributed systems or backend infrastructure for AI/ML products.
• Proficiency in Go or Java and Python.
• Experience with scalable, high-performance retrieval systems.

Responsibilities

• Architect agentic runtimes and evaluation infrastructure.
• Productionize AI workflows with guardrails and observability.
• Optimize performance and cost for enterprise data processing.

Skills

Go

Java

Python

Distributed systems

High-throughput APIs

Backend infrastructure

Kubernetes

FoundationDB

Vector indices

Data pipelines

Query optimization

Multi-tenant systems

Large-scale search

Tools

Kubernetes

FoundationDB

Job description

Snowflake is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the Cortex AI Search Infrastructure team, focused on building high-performance retrieval engines that power flagship products like CoWork, Cortex Code, and Cortex Agents. The role involves designing scalable systems for RAG, semantic indexing, and vector search, while optimizing performance and cost for enterprise-level data processing.

Responsibilities include architecting agentic runtimes, developing evaluation infrastructure, and productionizing AI workflows with strict guardrails and observability.

The ideal candidate has 9+ years of experience in distributed systems, high-throughput APIs, or backend infrastructure for AI/ML products, with deep proficiency in Go or Java and Python. Strong systems thinking is required, along with expertise in database internals, cloud-native architecture (Kubernetes, FoundationDB), and AI plumbing such as vector indices and data pipelines. Experience with query optimization, multi-tenant systems, and large-scale search infrastructure is a plus. The position is based in the U.S., with opportunities for remote work.