Principal Software Engineer - Data Ingestion Systems

Build the future of data. Join the Snowflake team.

The mission of the Snowflake Ingestion team is to empower customers to ingest, and transform their data reliably, accurately, and in real-time. Guided by Snowflake’s “no knobs” philosophy, our team focuses on building products that manage orchestration, performance, self-healing, security, and privacy so that customers can focus on their business logic. Leveraging our team’s extensive background in building database systems, we create infrastructure that is simple to operate and adaptable to diverse business requirements.

We are looking for strong technical leaders to shape the strategy, and lead our engineering team through execution of innovative solutions for the Data Ingestion systems of tomorrow. We are in the very early stages of building planet scale ingestion systems that encompass distributed systems, ingestion of unstructured and semi-structured data, distributed queuing, streaming capabilities, and multi-tenant query scheduling.

In addition, Snowflake has widely adopted and embraced Apache Iceberg. This brings ample opportunities to spearhead and drive the ingestion strategy to succeed in the new direction.

Note:

We are not looking for pure data scientists or data engineers.

• You will be part of a highly productive, fast moving, and growing team that is critical to realizing Snowflake’s Data Cloud Mission.
• Plan, lead, and execute complex technical projects that interact with a wide variety of teams within the company.
• Provide significant hands‑on technical contribution as well as oversight in multiple functional areas of the product.
• Provide the technical and strategic direction to define and build a full eco‑system of technologies and technical roadmap and vision.
• Develop and lead new ideas and innovations.
• Make contributions at the company‑wide level with longer-term objectives, usually 1-3 years in duration.
• Be a key decision‑maker on technical or business issues, which significantly impacts roles and responsibilities of others.
• Lead improvements to product stability and reliability, on‑call and service health, customer support, diagnosability and manageability of the product.
• Influence leadership on technical direction and product/team investment/pivot needs.
• Work closely with our product, engineering and support teams to identify customer pain points and opportunities leading to building solutions that delights customers and unleash innovations.
• Mentor and guide other senior and junior engineers and grow a strong technical expertise in the team

• 12+ years of hands‑on direct internal experience in building large scale data intensive distributed systems.
• Experience building technical vision and delivering on it through concrete products.
• Experience building enterprise grade, reliable and maintainable infrastructure software or services.
• Fluency in Java or C++ required
• Thrive in ambiguity and driving 0-1 projects
• Ability to work in a fast moving team environment and collaborate well in a geographically diverse environment
• Ability to work on‑site in our downtown Bellevue office in a hybrid mode

Every Snowflake employee is expected to follow the company’s confidentiality and security standards for handling sensitive data. Snowflake employees must abide by the company’s data security plan as an essential part of their duties. It is every employee’s duty to keep customer information secure and confidential.