Principal Software Engineer II

About the Company

Snowflake is building an industry-leading Cloud Data and AI Platform, solving challenging technical problems related to security, parallelism, distributed systems, and large-scale system maintenance. The Interoperable Foundations organization provides the foundational layer that powers Snowflake’s AI, Analytics, and Data Engineering capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Lead the ground-up redesign of core Metadata systems and transaction frameworks
• Drive innovation on Apache Iceberg for Analytics, Data Engineering, and AI workloads
• Build foundational metadata capabilities for AI agents, including lifecycle management and global replication
• Solve complex challenges in fault-tolerance, scalability, high availability, and performance
• Own end-to-end architecture and influence the product roadmap
• Mentor and grow the next generation of engineers

Requirements

• 15+ years of experience designing and supporting large-scale distributed services
• Deep expertise in database internals, including metadata management, query optimization, and catalogs
• Mastery of distributed systems, durability, correctness, multi-threading, and memory management
• Proven track record of implementing 0->1 solutions at massive cloud scale
• Strong mastery of data structures, algorithms, and consistency vs. performance trade-offs
• BS in Computer Science (advanced degree preferred)