Principal Software Engineer II - Interoperable Foundations

Snowflake is a company powering the era of the agentic enterprise, seeking AI-native thinkers across every function. The Principal Software Engineer II will lead the redesign of core metadata systems and drive innovation in Apache Iceberg, while building foundational capabilities for AI workloads and ensuring scalability and resilience in a rapidly growing ecosystem.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the ground-up redesign of our core Metadata systems, influencing the transaction frameworks that power query, DML, and AI-driven data interactions in addition to extending our lead on platform capabilities such as Zero Copy Cloning and Cross-Region / Cross-Cloud Replication
• Drive industry-leading innovation on Apache Iceberg, ensuring it serves as a first-class citizen for Analytics, Data Engineering, and high-performance AI workloads
• Build the foundational metadata capabilities - from richer metadata for AI workloads, to lifecycle management and global replication (Snowgrid)—that allow AI agents to navigate, understand, and act upon massive datasets in a secure and governed fashion
• Solve "impossible" challenges in fault-tolerance, scalability, high availability, and performance for services that must meet the demands of a rapidly growing global ecosystem
• Own the end-to-end architecture, influence the product roadmap, and identify the next innovations that will keep Snowflake at the cutting edge of the AI era
• Grow the next generation of engineers, fostering a culture of rigorous innovation and technical excellence

Requirements:

• 15+ years of experience designing and supporting large-scale distributed services
• Deep Database Internals Expertise: Comprehensive knowledge of metadata management, query optimization, clustering, compaction, catalogs, and large-scale data management
• Systems Mastery: Excellent understanding of distributed systems, durability and correctness fundamentals, multi-threading, memory management, and storage performance
• Cloud-Scale Track Record: A history of implementing creative, 0->1 solutions for complex problems at massive scale
• CS Fundamentals: Strong mastery of data structures, algorithms, and the trade-offs between consistency and performance
• Education: BS in Computer Science
• an advanced degree is preferred