Staff Software Engineer

About the role

This role focuses on developing AI products within Snowflake's data and application platform. You will help customers discover, share, monetize, and interact with data assets and applications more easily. This position is crucial for building the infrastructure that connects enterprise data with AI capabilities.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Lead the design and implementation of large, complex projects across multiple teams, transforming abstract opportunities into concrete technical solutions.
• Define the architecture for how datasets, applications, semantic assets, and AI capabilities are shared, found, governed, and used within Snowflake and external AI environments.
• Develop and refine APIs, metadata models, runtime discovery systems, and sharing protocols to make enterprise assets accessible to AI agents and developer workflows.
• Collaborate with product managers, designers, and platform teams to deliver impactful customer experiences that enhance AI-native collaboration on Snowflake.
• Oversee critical product areas, ensuring service health, quality, customer impact, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
• Identify and resolve systemic issues affecting customer experience or engineering speed, implementing solutions that benefit multiple teams beyond a single release.
• Make informed engineering decisions balancing product value, technical complexity, scalability, and strategic importance, aligning with Snowflake's overall goals.
• Mentor other engineers, improve code and design review quality, and foster technical expertise within the team.
• Contribute hands-on across the entire stack, from backend systems and APIs to user interfaces, to deliver significant customer value.

Requirements

• 9+ years of professional software engineering experience, including managing large-scale production systems.
• Proven history of leading major projects or complex cross-team initiatives from initial problem definition through architecture, execution, and deployment.
• Deep knowledge in at least one key area such as distributed systems, data/application sharing, or AI-powered product interfaces, with the ability to contribute in other areas when necessary.
• Strong backend engineering skills in Java, Go, Python, or similar languages, along with sufficient product or frontend understanding to influence end-to-end user experiences.
• Experience designing APIs, service architectures, and platform abstractions that are scalable and easy for other teams to build upon.
• Demonstrated ability to navigate ambiguity, use data to guide decisions, and build consensus among engineering and cross-functional stakeholders.
• Strong product and customer instincts, including anticipating future needs and translating them into technical plans.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including creating technical roadmaps, design documents, and leading technical discussions across teams.
• BS/MS in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to have

• Experience with agentic workflows, MCP servers, LLM integrations, semantic search, or AI-assisted product experiences.
• Familiarity with marketplace, data-sharing, application platform, or ecosystem-style products.
• Experience building governance, metadata, discovery, or catalog systems for enterprise platforms.

Skills & tools

• Java
• Go
• Python
• Distributed Systems
• APIs
• Service Architectures
• Platform Abstractions

Practical notes

This role offers a chance to influence how Snowflake customers securely and effectively expose data and applications to AI systems. The work combines platform engineering, product innovation, and AI transformation, directly shaping the future of the Data Cloud. Snowflake is growing rapidly, and this team is scaling to support that growth.