Staff Software Engineer - Database Engineering

About the Position

Staff Software Engineer - Database Engineering

US-CA-Menlo Park

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. You don’t just use tools; you possess an innate curiosity, treating AI as a high-trust collaborator that is core to how you solve problems and accelerate your impact. We look for low-ego individuals who thrive in dynamic and fast-moving environments and move with an experimental mindset - who rapidly test emerging capabilities to discover simpler, more powerful ways to deliver results. At Snowflake, your role isn't just to execute a function, but to help redefine the future of how work gets done.

Snowflake is a high-growth, cloud-native data platform company committed to empowering enterprises to achieve their full potential. With a culture built on impact, innovation, and collaboration, we offer an environment where you can build large-scale systems, move fast, and take your technology career to the next level.

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Responsibilities

As a Staff Software Engineer at Snowflake, you will:

• Design and implement novel query optimization or distributed data processing algorithms to maintain Snowflake's industry-leading data warehousing capabilities.
• Design, develop, and support a petabyte-scale cloud database system, ensuring it is highly parallel and fault-tolerant.
• Develop and implement the new service architecture required to enable the next generation of the Snowflake Data Cloud.
• Analyze, understand, and resolve complex performance and scalability bottlenecks within the system.
• Own the end-to-end delivery of your projects, including identifying solutions, design, implementation, rigorous testing, and safe production rollout.
• Ensure operational readiness and execute production operations of services, meeting our customer commitments for durability, availability, and performance.
• Build high-quality, highly reliable software that meets the demands of the world's largest companies.
• Develop tools to provide customers with greater insight into their workloads.
• Evangelize best practices for database usage and end-to-end system architecture.
• Mentor and support the professional growth of junior engineers on the team.

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Requirements

Our ideal Staff Software Engineer will have:

• 6+ years of industry experience working on commercial or open-source software.
• Strong fluency in C/C++ and/or Java.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and a deep understanding of Computer Science fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems.
• Strong systems programming skills, including experience with multi-threading and concurrency.
• A solid foundation in distributed systems concepts (e.g., consistency, scaling, failure recovery).
• Experience with implementation testing, debugging, and documentation, specifically within a Linux development environment.
• Bachelor’s degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.

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Nice to Have

• Working experience in database internal design and implementation.
• Systems programming.
• Large scale distributed systems design and implementation.
• Experience with working on design, implementation, and production-izing distributed key value stores like FoundationDB across multiple clouds.

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We Offer

Snowflake is growing fast, and we’re scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth. We are looking for people who share our values, challenge ordinary thinking, and push the pace of innovation while building a future for themselves and Snowflake.

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About the Company

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. You don’t just use tools; you possess an innate curiosity, treating AI as a high-trust collaborator that is core to how you solve problems and accelerate your impact. We look for low-ego individuals who thrive in dynamic and fast-moving environments and move with an experimental mindset - who rapidly test emerging capabilities to discover simpler, more powerful ways to deliver results. At Snowflake, your role isn't just to execute a function, but to help redefine the future of how work gets done.

Snowflake is a high-growth, cloud-native data platform company committed to empowering enterprises to achieve their full potential. With a culture built on impact, innovation, and collaboration, we offer an environment where you can build large-scale systems, move fast, and take your technology career to the next level.

For jobs located in the United States, please visit the job posting on the Snowflake Careers Site for salary and benefits information: careers.snowflake.com