Staff Software Engineer - Database Engineering

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.

Snowflake is a high-growth, cloud-native data platform company committed to empowering enterprises to achieve their full potential. With a culture built on impact, innovation, and collaboration, we offer an environment where you can build large-scale systems, move fast, and take your technology career to the next level.

We are seeking a highly talented and experienced Software Engineer to join our Database Engineering https://snowflake.phenompro.com/us/en/database-engineering team. In this role, you will be a key contributor to the evolution of our core product: an elastic, large-scale, high-performance data processing system. We are looking for smart, enthusiastic engineers who can quickly master complex technical areas and are passionate about building new, industry-leading technologies.

AS A STAFF SOFTWARE ENGINEER AT SNOWFLAKE, YOU WILL:

- Design and implement novel query optimization or distributed data processing algorithms to maintain Snowflake's industry-leading data warehousing capabilities.

- Design, develop, and support a petabyte-scale cloud database system, ensuring it is highly parallel and fault-tolerant.

- Develop and implement the new service architecture required to enable the next generation of the Snowflake Data Cloud.

- Analyze, understand, and resolve complex performance and scalability bottlenecks within the system.

- Own the end-to-end delivery of your projects, including identifying solutions, design, implementation, rigorous testing, and safe production rollout.

- Ensure operational readiness and execute production operations of services, meeting our customer commitments for durability, availability, and performance.

- Build high-quality, highly reliable software that meets the demands of the world's largest companies.

- Develop tools to provide customers with greater insight into their workloads.

- Evangelize best practices for database usage and end-to-end system architecture.

- Mentor and support the professional growth of junior engineers on the team.

OUR IDEAL STAFF SOFTWARE ENGINEER WILL HAVE:

- 6+ years of industry experience working on commercial or open-source software.

- Strong fluency in C/C++ and/or Java