Staff Software Engineer, Cortex AI Search Infrastructure

The role

You will build high-performance retrieval engines that power Snowflake Cortex. This involves architecting agentic runtimes, scaling context engineering infrastructure, and building an evals engine.

What you will do

• Architect Agentic Runtimes to build and scale orchestration engines.
• Scale Context Engineering Infra including vector database integration and search indexing.
• Build the Evals Engine for automated simulations and error analysis pipelines.
• Productionize AI Workflows by turning LLM capabilities into multi-tenant microservices.
• Optimize Performance and Cost through model routing and token optimization.

Required qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field.
• 9 + years of experience building distributed systems, high-throughput APIs, or backend infrastructure for AI/ML products.
• Deep proficiency in Go or Java (for systems) and Python (for AI orchestration).
• Strong understanding of database internals, distributed state management, and cloud-native architecture (Kubernetes, FoundationDB, etc.).
• Familiarity with the plumbing of AI: vector indices, agent platforms, and building scalable data pipelines.

Nice to have

• Query optimization and SQL engine internals.
• Designing multi-tenant systems that handle sensitive enterprise data at scale.
• Developing search infrastructure for large-scale applications.
• Direct experience with any of the subsystems outlined above.

About the company

The Cortex team is building the future of AI for enterprise data. Snowflake is powering the era of the agentic enterprise.