Staff Software Engineer - Metadata

Snowflake; Bellevue (WA); On-site; USD 236,000 - 339,000; Full time

Job summary

Snowflake is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Metadata team to lead the design of core metadata and replication systems across multiple teams, and to set scale, consistency, and fault tolerance direction for the metadata layer.

You will influence cross-region and cross-cloud replication, meet demanding performance targets, mentor engineers, and partner with product to translate customer needs into durable technical designs.

Qualifications

• 10+ years building large-scale distributed systems or database internals.
• BS/MS in Computer Science or related field or equivalent experience.
• Strong development skills in Java or C++.
• Proven record leading multi-team technical initiatives from design to production.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design of core metadata and replication systems across multiple teams.
• Set technical direction for scalability, consistency, and fault tolerance of the metadata layer.
• Drive cross-region and cross-cloud replication toward lower RPO and higher reliability.
• Solve hard problems in performance, availability, and correctness at global scale.
• Mentor senior engineers and grow technical leaders on the team.

Skills

Distributed systems leadership

Java or C++

Technical leadership

Education

BS/MS in Computer Science

Tools

FoundationDB

AWS

Azure

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.

Staff Software Engineer – Metadata

Company Pitch

Snowflake is the AI Data Cloud. Thousands of organizations run their most critical data, analytics, and AI workloads on our platform. We built Snowflake for the cloud from day one: near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance. Our goal is to make every organization's data instantly useful and always available.

Team Pitch

The Metadata team owns the brain of Snowflake. Every query, table, transaction, and permission depends on the metadata layer we build. Our systems handle millions of metadata operations per second. We also power cross-region and cross-cloud replication and failover, keeping customer data available through outages. If you want hard distributed-systems problems with direct customer impact, this is the team.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design of core metadata and replication systems across multiple teams.
• Set technical direction for scalability, consistency, and fault tolerance of the metadata layer.
• Drive cross-region and cross-cloud replication toward lower RPO and higher reliability.
• Solve hard problems in performance, availability, and correctness at global scale.
• Partner with Product and architects to turn customer needs into durable designs.
• Raise the operational bar through observability, safe rollouts, and blast-radius controls.
• Mentor senior engineers and grow technical leaders on the team.

Requirements

Core Requirements

• 10+ years building large-scale distributed systems or database internals.
• Strong development skills in Java or C++.
• Proven record leading multi-team technical initiatives from design to production.
• Deep understanding of consistency, transactions, and fault tolerance.
• BS/MS in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience.

Any of the following would make you a stronger candidate:

• Experience with FoundationDB or other distributed key-value stores.
• Experience building replication, disaster recovery, or geo-distributed systems.
• Experience with database metadata, catalogs, or query compilation.
• Experience running services on AWS, Azure, or GCP.

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?

The following represents the expected range of compensation for this role:

• The estimated base salary range for this role is $236,000 - $339,200.
• 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.