Principal Software Engineer - Metadata

Principal Software Engineer - Metadata role at Snowflake

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.

Build the future of the AI Data Cloud. Join the Snowflake team. The Metadata team builds a scalable metadata system that allows Snowflake to query across petabyte‑scale data efficiently. The team develops distributed and multi‑layered caches, transaction frameworks, declarative entity management, time travel and other core Snowflake services. It is also responsible for providing the foundation of global features like cross‑region replication, data sharing, and data marketplace.

• Solve real business needs at large scale by applying your software engineering and analytical problem‑solving skills.
• Create architecture and design, influence our product roadmap, and take ownership and responsibility over new projects.
• Design, develop, and support a highly‑parallel and fault‑tolerant database system including a decentralized caching system of terabytes of metadata with an ever‐growing request rate.
• Design and implement core foundational features including transactions, DDL/DML logs, metadata API as well as advanced features built on top of the metadata, such as declarative entity management and integrations to support developer tool chains.
• Analyze and understand performance and scalability bottlenecks in the system and solve them.
• Ensure operational readiness of the services and meet the commitments to our customers regarding availability and performance.

• 14+ years industry experience designing, building and supporting large‑scale systems in production.
• Strong computer science fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems.
• Sharp original thinking to make the right choices and guide teams.
• Systems programming skills including multi‑threading, concurrency, caching, etc. Fluency in Java or other similar procedural object‑oriented language is preferred.
• Track record of identifying and implementing creative solutions to complex problems.
• Knowledge of database internals is a big plus.
• Ability to work effectively across engineering teams in multiple locations.
• BS in Computer Science;
  Masters or PhD preferred.

• Mid‑Senior level

• Full‑time

• Engineering and Information Technology
• Software Development

For jobs located in the United States, please visit the job posting on the Snowflake Careers Site for salary and benefits information: