Principal Software Engineer - Observability

The role

You will build an AI-driven observability platform that helps customers and engineers understand workload health. You will architect distributed infrastructure, ship observability products, and develop agentic workflows for detection and diagnosis.

What you will do

• Architect and build distributed infrastructure.
• Design scalable pipelines and services for ingesting, storing, and querying logs, metrics, traces, and events.
• Ship observability products to customers.
• Partner with product management and design to deliver customer-facing capabilities.
• Build AI-driven detection and diagnosis.
• Develop agentic workflows that correlate signals and recommend remediation steps.
• Build and work AI-first.
• Translate ambiguous customer and developer needs into practical designs and milestones.
• Deliver intuitive APIs, SDKs, and self-service experiences.
• Write and review production code, diagnose complex failures, and mentor engineers.

Required qualifications

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including technical leadership of complex backend, infrastructure, or data-platform initiatives spanning multiple teams.
• Deep experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong understanding of concurrency, consistency, caching, failure recovery, storage and query efficiency, and performance.
• Strong computer science fundamentals.
• Hands-on proficiency in Java, Go, C++, or a comparable backend language.
• Experience with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
• An AI-first engineering practice.
• A track record of shipping products to external customers.
• Clear written communication.
• Low-ego collaboration.
• Strong ownership.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers.

Nice to have

• Experience building observability, monitoring, or analytics platforms (logs, metrics, traces, alerting)
• OpenTelemetry
• time-series or columnar storage
• AIOps or agentic diagnosis systems
• developer-facing data products

About the company

Snowflake's AI Data Cloud supports critical enterprise workloads across multiple clouds and regions. The company is scaling its team to enable and accelerate growth.