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Principal Software Engineer II - Interoperable Foundations

Snowflake Inc.· Engineering
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Hybrid (US-WA-Bellevue), Hybrid (US-CA-Menlo Park)$304k - $437kFull-timePosted 7mo ago

About the role

Lead a 0->1 ground-up redesign of Snowflake's core metadata and storage architecture within the Interoperable Foundations organization, focusing on metadata engineering, open standards (Apache Iceberg), and building an AI-ready, interoperable data foundation at exabyte scale.

Responsibilities

  • 0->1 Metadata Redesign: Lead the ground-up re-architecture of our core metadata systems. Build highly concurrent transaction frameworks powering query, DML, and AI-driven data interactions, ensuring metadata layer scales for agentic AI.
  • Championing the Open Standard (Apache Iceberg): Drive industry-defining innovations on Iceberg to deliver native-level performance and governance with no vendor lock-in.
  • Building the Agentic Foundation: Build rich metadata structures that provide AI agents with semantic understanding and governance for navigating and manipulating massive global datasets.
  • Scale & Systems Resilience: Solve fault tolerance, high availability, and extreme performance challenges for a global, multi-cloud ecosystem.
  • Strategic Influence: Own end-to-end platform architecture, shape the roadmap for metadata interfaces with AI, and mentor engineers in a low-ego, high-impact environment.

Qualifications

  • 15+ Years Systems Experience: Designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems and multi-cloud interoperability.
  • Database Internals Builder: Deep expertise in database internals, metadata management, query optimization, data catalog, compaction, or large-scale state management.
  • 0->1 Technical Leadership: Experience delivering greenfield, cloud-scale solutions and migrating massive distributed systems to next-generation architectures.
  • Core Systems Fundamentals: Strong understanding of storage performance, distributed consistency, and relevant algorithms.

Skills

Required:Systems design and architectureDatabase internals0->1 technical leadership
Last updated Oct 1, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Snowflake Inc.

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