Principal Software Engineer II, Horizon Catalog

Principal Software Engineer II, Horizon Catalog

Snowflake is about empowering enterprises to achieve their full potential - and people too. With a culture that’s all in on impact, innovation, and collaboration, Snowflake is the sweet spot for building big, moving fast, and taking technology - and careers - to the next level.

The Snowflake Horizon Catalog is the Universal AI Catalog, providing built‑in context and governance for AI across all enterprise data. It is compatible with any engine, any data format, and runs anywhere. Horizon Catalog unifies discovery, security, compliance, and collaboration, serving as the single source of truth for the entire data estate.

This role is central to Snowflake’s culture of impact, innovation, and collaboration. We are looking for a visionary engineering leader to drive company‑wide technical strategy and execute critical, multi‑year initiatives with cross‑organizational impact.

• Set Technical Vision: Lead strategic planning for the Horizon Catalog, translating complex business goals into technical architecture, and developing high‑impact engineering roadmaps.

• Drive Product Influence: Actively influence and co‑develop the product roadmap in partnership with the PM team.

• High‑velocity execution: Directly lead execution of high‑complexity initiatives, and guide the execution of other initiatives in the team.

• Technical Mentorship: Mentor and grow senior engineers.

• 15+ years experience designing and building large‑scale distributed services.

• Metadata mastery: Deep expertise in metadata management and designing architectures to unify data from heterogeneous sources for governance.

• Governance expertise: Proven ability to architect fine‑grained access control and audit systems.

• Strategic leadership: Track record of translating high‑level business strategy into actionable engineering roadmaps and influencing technical direction across multiple teams.

• Fluency in Java or another similar procedural object‑oriented language.

• BS, Master’s or PhD in Computer Science.

• AI/Semantic architecture: Experience leveraging semantic metadata to power AI experiences, such as RAG for discovery.

• Competitive fluency: Ability to articulate architectural differentiation against key competitors.

• Modern access control: Solid understanding of RBAC and ABAC principles applied to scalable permissioning layers.

• MCP/Agent ecosystems: Experience exposing catalog/search tools via Multi‑Cloud Platforms for third‑party agents, including safety and policy integration.

Build an industry‑leading Cloud Data and AI Platform, solving challenging technical problems related to security, parallelism, distributed systems, and large‑scale system maintenance. Join a world‑class team and innovate with rigor.

Snowflake is growing fast, and we are 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.

Posterior to this description, the salary range and benefits will be provided. For jobs located in the United States, please visit the Snowflake Careers Site for salary and benefits information:

• The estimated base salary range for this role is $304,000 - $437,000.
• Additionally, this role is eligible to participate in Snowflake’s bonus and equity plan.
• Competitive benefits package 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.

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