Principal Software Engineer
At a glance
Senior Engineering Leadership role at Snowflake. Menlo Park · full-time · $236,000–$339,200 base.
techroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Build AI-first platforms, tools, and practices that make Snowsight developers more productive
- Set direction for agent-based development workflows and infrastructure that supports much higher developer productivity
- Strengthen reliability through observability, alerting, service-level objectives, and automated fixes
- Work with product, architecture, engineering, and business partners to deliver complete solutions
- Improve engineering processes, tools, and standards across the team
What you bring
- At least twelve years building developer tools for large codebases
- Experience with enterprise build systems and fluency in Go, Java, or Python
- Strong computer science foundations, including algorithms, data structures, and distributed systems
- Experience or a clear interest in AI or LLM applications, such as agents, prompt and tool design, evaluations, or production features
Who this fits
This role suits a senior engineer who enjoys improving developer productivity, setting technical priorities, and mentoring junior engineers. You'll need to work on-site at the Menlo Park, California or Bellevue, Washington office.
From the employer
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.
About the Team
The Apps & Experiences (AppEx) organization powers the unified user experience (Snowsight) for Snowflake. Every major Snowflake customer interacts with our platform through these surfaces, making AppEx central to both customer satisfaction and revenue growth.
Within Appex, our team sits at the intersection of AI, platform, and user experience. We are on a mission to create an AI‑first, scalable, maintainable, and extensible platform to build all Snowflake user experience features. The team owns:
The serving layer that powers Snowsight, Snowflake CoWork, and UX features
Developer tooling that enable our engineers to move fast and deliver
Frontend infrastructure and shared services for product teams
CI pipelines that ensure fast and reliable builds
Testing and validation platform that maintains code and product quality
The monitoring and logging stack that ensures observability and trust
What You Will Do
As a software engineer on the team, you will play a central role in delivering the next generation of tools and evolve our developer infrastructure and tooling to be scalable, highly performant, and AI-first.
Design and build AI-first platforms, tools, and best practices to significantly enhance the developer experience for Snowsight
Drive strategy and initiatives to improve agentic development workflows and build infrastructure to support 10x increases in developer productivity
Improve platform reliability by investing in observability, alerting, SLOs, and automated remediation across our systems.
Collaborate with product managers, architects, other engineering teams, and business groups, to drive end-to-end solutions.
Contribute to improving our engineering processes, tooling, and standards.
What We’re Looking For
Our ideal Principal Software Engineer will have:
Strong passion for making developers highly productive.
12+ years industry experience developing tools for large codebases.
Passion for AI-first processes and for building platforms that enable many teams to move faster while keeping systems maintainable and safe.
Experience with or strong interest in AI or LLM-based applications (agents, prompt/tool engineering, evals, or productionized AI features)
Experience working on enterprise-grade build systems.
Excellent problem solving skills, and strong CS fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems.
Fluency in Go, Java, or Python.
Ability to work in a team environment, collaborate well, and mentor junior engineers.
A strategic mindset and strong sense of what to prioritize for maximum impact.
Excellent interpersonal communication skills.
Outstanding written and oral English language skills
Ability to work on-site at our Bellevue, WA or Menlo Park, CA offices.
If you’re excited about building the platform and AI systems that power how the world’s largest companies experience Snowflake, we’d love to hear from you.
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.
How do you want to make your impact?
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
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