Principal / Staff Applied Research Scientist

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.

• Lead research projects that apply formal methods, program analysis, automated reasoning, and AI-driven techniques (including code generation and modeling) to real problems in our…
• Translate research ideas into prototypes, then into shipped capabilities that move concrete business metrics — quality, velocity, reliability, and operational performance at scale.
• Partner closely with engineering leaders, product managers, and key customers to identify high-leverage opportunities and turn them into deliverables.
• Influence the engineering and product roadmap; advise leaders on which research directions are pragmatic and which are not.
• Train and uplevel engineering teams on new methods, and scale those methods across the organization.

What they're looking for

• PhD (or equivalent research experience) in Computer Science or a closely related field.
• Depth across the areas this role sits at the intersection of:
• Formal methods — e.g., model checking, theorem proving, SAT/SMT, program verification, type systems, or program analysis.
• Distributed systems — designing, reasoning about, or verifying large-scale concurrent and distributed systems.
• Software engineering — strong fundamentals; able to go from a research idea to production-quality code in collaboration with engineering teams.

Tech stack

• Snowflake