Principal Software Engineer II - Interoperable Foundations

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.

The Mission:
Building the Data Foundations for AIWe are the Snowflake Interoperable Foundations organization - the foundational layer that powers Snowflake’s AI, Analytics and Data Engineering capabilities. We lead innovations across open table formats such as Apache Iceberg, helping customers build peta-byte scale multi-cloud data lakes on Snowflake. We deliver core Metadata capabilities that power Snowflake’s industry-leading performance, AI, governance and platform features.

We are embarking on a 0-1 redesign of our core systems across Interoperable Foundations. While we already manage exabyte-scale data supporting Snowflake’s AI capabilities, the next frontier is providing the foundational data layer that accelerates agentic innovation in an open, multi-format data world, You will be setting the technical vision across our investments in metadata platforms, Apache Iceberg and AI-ready storage.

Your Impact:
From Redesign to Reality0-1 Architectural Leadership:
Lead the ground-up redesign of our core Metadata systems, influencing the transaction frameworks that power query, DML, and AI-driven data interactions in addition to extending our lead on platform capabilities such as Zero Copy Cloning and Cross-Region / Cross-Cloud Replication.

Iceberg

Innovation: Drive industry-leading innovation on Apache Iceberg, ensuring it serves as a first-class citizen for Analytics, Data Engineering, and high-performance AI workloads.

AI & Agentic Foundation:
Build the foundational metadata capabilities - from richer metadata for AI workloads, to lifecycle management and global replication (Snowgrid)—that allow AI agents to navigate, understand, and act upon massive datasets in a secure and governed fashion.

Scalability & Resilience:
Solve "impossible" challenges in fault-tolerance, scalability, high availability, and performance for services that must meet the demands of a rapidly growing global ecosystem.

Strategic Influence:
Own the end-to-end architecture, influence the product roadmap, and identify the next innovations that will keep Snowflake at the cutting edge of the AI era.

Mentorship:
Grow the next generation of engineers, fostering a culture of rigorous innovation and technical excellence.

What You Bring
15+ years of experience designing and supporting large-scale distributed services.

Deep Database Internals Expertise:
Comprehensive knowledge of metadata management, query optimization, clustering, compaction, catalogs, and large-scale data management.

Systems Mastery:
Excellent understanding of distributed systems, durability and correctness fundamentals, multi-threading, memory management, and storage performance.

Cloud-Scale Track Record: A history of implementing creative, 0-1 solutions for complex problems at massive scale.

CS Fundamentals:
Strong mastery of data structures, algorithms, and the trade-offs between consistency and performance.

Education:

BS in Computer Science; an advanced degree is preferred.

Why Snowflake?

Build an industry-leading Cloud Data and AI Platform, solving challenging technical…