Principal Software Engineer - Agentic Pipelines

Job summary

Responsibilities

At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise. To usher in this new era, we seek AI-native thinkers across every function who are energized by the opportunity to reinvent how they work.

• Define and drive the technical direction for Snowflake's core data engineering and streaming transformation primitives, spanning Streams, Tasks, Dynamic Tables, and adjacent…
• Identify and lead multi-quarter technical investments — performance, scalability, correctness, and reliability — translating ambiguous problem spaces into concrete engineering…
• Partner with product, research, and peer engineering teams to co-design primitives that compose cleanly across the data engineering stack.
• Operate as a force multiplier: run architectural reviews, set the technical bar for design documents, and help engineers grow through high-quality feedback and sponsorship.
• Work directly with customers and field teams to understand real-world usage patterns; use that signal to prioritize what matters next.

What they're looking for

• 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.

Tech stack

• C++
• Java
• BigQuery
• Databricks
• Kafka
• Spark
• dbt
• Airflow