Snowflake

Principal Software Engineer - Agentic Pipelines

US-WA-Bellevue. Posted a month ago

The role

You will define and drive technical direction for core data engineering and streaming transformation primitives. You will lead technical investments in performance, scalability, and reliability while partnering with product and research teams.

What you will do

  • Define and drive technical direction for core data engineering and streaming transformation primitives.
  • Identify and lead multi-quarter technical investments in performance, scalability, correctness, and reliability.
  • Partner with product, research, and peer engineering teams to co-design primitives.
  • Run architectural reviews and set the technical bar for design documents.
  • Help engineers grow through high-quality feedback and sponsorship.
  • Work directly with customers and field teams to understand usage patterns.
  • Contribute to Snowflake's technical reputation through design influence, talks, or research publications.

Required qualifications

  • 15+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed data systems.
  • Deep expertise in at least one core area: stream processing, declarative query execution, pipeline orchestration, or data transformation at scale.
  • Strong computer science fundamentals: distributed systems, algorithms, fault tolerance, and consistency models.
  • Proficiency in C++ or Java.
  • Comfort with systems-level reasoning (latency, throughput, resource efficiency at cloud scale).
  • Demonstrated ability to lead cross-team technical initiatives from blank-page architecture through production at petabyte scale across thousands of concurrent workloads.
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills.

Nice to have

  • Experience with one or more major analytical databases (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks, Teradata, etc).
  • Hands-on background in streaming, transformation, or event-driven systems (Flink, Kafka, Spark Structured Streaming).
  • Familiarity with the broader data engineering ecosystem: dbt, Airflow, Fivetran, Iceberg, Delta Lake.
  • Experience with CDC, change propagation, or incremental computation patterns.
  • Advanced degree (MS or PhD) in Computer Science, with emphasis on database or distributed systems.

About the company

Snowflake is powering the era of the agentic enterprise. The company is scaling its team to enable and accelerate growth.