← All roles

Principal Software Engineer - Performance Engineering (Cloud Infrastructure)

Snowflake Inc.· Engineering
Apply on company site
US-CA-Menlo Park$264k - $379.5kFull-timePosted 1mo ago

About the role

Principal Performance Engineer to drive Snowflake’s cloud infrastructure performance strategy, with deep hardware specialization and cross-functional leadership across CSPs and silicon partners.

Responsibilities

  • Own new hardware evaluation and enablement. Lead evaluation of new AWS, Azure, and GCP instance types (e.g., AWS Graviton, AMD Turin, Azure ARM/Cobalt, GCP Axion) by building representative benchmark and evaluation solutions.
  • Set performance strategy and architecture. Shape the team's technical roadmap, set direction on measurement methodology, and translate benchmark results into concrete rollout and adoption recommendations.
  • Lead cross-functional and CSP partnerships. Work across engineering and Finance along with AWS, Azure, GCP to qualify new hardware and influence future cloud-instance designs.
  • Characterize hardware performance at a deep level. Analyze CPU microarchitecture (e.g., memory bandwidth, PMU counters, I/O behavior) to identify workload-specific bottlenecks and drive resolution.
  • Develop price/performance model to support new hardware transitions.
  • Automate day-zero hardware readiness. Build automated performance-validation workflows and per-provider/per-instance scorecards so Snowflake can qualify and price new silicon at or near cloud-provider GA.
  • Grow the performance engineering discipline. Mentor engineers, build out benchmarking capability, and drive company-wide performance education (e.g., a recurring Performance Tech Talk series).

Qualifications

  • 12+ years of experience in performance engineering, systems engineering, or infrastructure engineering, with a track record of principal-level technical leadership.
  • Deep expertise in cloud infrastructure performance across at least one major CSP (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including instance types, pricing models, and capacity constraints.
  • Strong grounding in hardware/systems fundamentals: CPU microarchitecture, memory bandwidth, I/O subsystems, and use of profiling tools (PMU counters, etc.) to root-cause performance bottlenecks.
  • Experience building or operating large-scale benchmarking systems (e.g., TPC-DS-style workloads) and turning benchmark output into actionable optimization strategies and pricing/rollout decisions.
  • Ability to build quantitative models connecting technical performance metrics to business outcomes (pricing multipliers, cost-per-query).
  • A track record of leading cross-functional, cross-company initiatives — comfortable being the primary technical point of contact with external hardware and cloud partners (CSPs, silicon vendors).
  • Bias toward automation: builds scorecards, dashboards, and validation pipelines rather than relying on one-off analysis.

Skills

Required:Hardware performance analysisBenchmarks & benchmarking systemsPrice/performance modelingCross-functional leadership
Last updated Sep 17, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Snowflake Inc.

The Data Platform Built for Data Teams.

Snowflake powers AI, data engineering, applications, and analytics on a trusted, scalable AI Data Cloud—eliminating silos and accelerating innovation.

AIData CloudData EngineeringAnalyticsApplications & Collaboration
Company profileWebsite

More open roles at Snowflake Inc.