Staff Software Engineer, App Runtime

About the role

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 role

The App Runtime team is building a platform that lets every Snowflake user go from an idea to a live, deployed web application (Node.js first) in minutes. We own the end-to-end experience of building and running apps, from Cortex AI-assisted development to deployment in a secure, scalable infrastructure. Apps built on the platform inherit Snowflake's security, governance, lineage, and access controls by default. See Deploy Faster with Snowflake Apps https://www.snowflake.com/en/blog/snowflake-apps-build-deploy-faster/.

As a Staff/Principal Engineer, you will shape the product and its architecture. It’s a high leverage role - you will lead a team to scale and harden an early-stage, public-preview product. Your decisions will have a long-lasting impact on the future of Snowflake as an app platform. This role requires a unique combination of deep hands-on expertise in scalability, performance and security, great product instincts, customer obsession and the organizational influence to drive cross-team programs.

Responsibilities

- Own the roadmap and technical decisions to evolve the public-preview platform into a production-grade one, adding features like horizontal scaling, cost efficiency via suspend/resume, support for stacks beyond Node.js, and stronger access and data-governance controls

- Stay deeply hands-on by authoring specs and implementing critical code across components from runtime infrastructure and the governance model to coding agents and user interfaces; lead by example

- Serve as the primary technical representative for App Runtime internally and externally

- Partner directly with customers, i.e. developers building Snowflake Apps, converting their needs to roadmap priorities

- Grow the team by setting a high engineering bar and incubating the next generation of technical leaders

- Align with adjacent teams like Container Platform, Networking, Cortex AI, Security and Snowsight on shared goals

Requirements:

- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field. Master’s or higher is preferred but not a requirement

- 10+ years of experience, with a demonstrated track record of architecting, shipping and operating high-scale, container-based (e.g. Kubernetes) platforms, including staff-level ownership of technical direction, cross-team delivery, and mentoring