Senior Software Engineer - Foundation DB
At a glance
Senior Software Engineering role at Snowflake. Menlo Park · full-time · $200,000–$287,000 base.
techroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Identify high-impact database problems, then take projects from solution design through testing and safe production release
- Design and build high-performance systems that can handle rising database request volumes
- Develop the next generation of transaction, caching, storage-engine, and multi-tenant capabilities
- Find performance and scale bottlenecks, add instrumentation where needed, and implement fixes
- Promote sound database practices and end-to-end architecture across the team
What you bring
- At least six years of hands-on software engineering experience
- Strong systems-programming skills, including concurrency and multithreading, with fluency in C++, C, or Java preferred
- Experience building and operating large distributed systems or web services, plus strong computer science foundations
- A record of delivering complex distributed-systems projects and solving difficult technical problems
Who this fits
This role suits a senior engineer who is drawn to large-scale databases and distributed systems, and who communicates and collaborates well. You’ll work on FoundationDB features involving performance, scale, reliability, and operability.
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.
There is only one Data Cloud. Snowflake’s founders started from scratch and designed a data platform built for the cloud that is effective, affordable, and accessible to all data users. But it didn’t stop there. They engineered Snowflake to power the Data Cloud, where thousands of organizations unlock the value of their data with near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance. This is our vision: a world with endless insights to tackle the challenges and opportunities of today and reveal the possibilities of tomorrow.
FoundationDB (FDB) is an open source, highly scalable database capable of ACID transactions at high frequencies and low latencies. FDB has been a core component in Snowflake's unique shared-metadata architecture since 2014, making possible Snowflake's vision to build the greatest data warehouse for the cloud. FDB performs millions of transactions per second across thousands of processes. The FDB team builds features on open-source FDB that improve the performance, scale, reliability and operability of the product.
We are looking for an outstanding Senior Software Engineer with a passion for large scale databases and distributed systems to help us take FoundationDB to the next level. FoundationDB powers all of Snowflake’s products and services and is rapidly evolving to meet Snowflake’s future needs. We are growing at a fast rate and we need to scale FoundationDB by at least one order of magnitude over the next few years. Additionally, new workloads are emerging that need FoundationDB’s reliability, high availability and strong consistency semantics. These workloads will require innovation to re-architect the core components of our system.
AS A SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER AT SNOWFLAKE, YOU WILL:
Identify strategically important problems, inefficiencies or opportunities for impactful improvements
Own the end to end delivery of your projects, from identifying a solution, to design, implementation, test and safe production rollout
Design and implement critical high performance systems to handle the ever growing request rate of our database
Build the next generation transaction system, caching, storage engine and multi tenant capabilities
Evangelize best practices in database usage and end-to-end architecture.
Analyze and understand performance and scalability bottlenecks in the system and solve them.
Pinpoint problems, instrument relevant components as needed, and ultimately implement solutions.
OUR IDEAL SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER WILL HAVE:
6+ years hands-on software engineering experience.
Systems programming skills including multi-threading, concurrency, etc. Fluency in C++, C, or Java is preferred.
Experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems or web services
Experience with scalable Key-Value stores such as FoundationDB, RocksDB/LevelDB, DynamoDB, Redis, etc. a plus.
Strong CS fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems.
Track record of delivering highly complex projects in the distributed systems space
Intense curiosity, willingness to question and passion for making systems better
Strong technical problem solving, communication, and collaboration skills
Excitement by the challenge of hard technical problems
BS in Computer Science; Masters or PhD Preferred.
About Snowflake:
About FoundationDB:
FoundationDB Summit 2018 and FoundationDB Summit 2019
How FDB powers Snowflake Metadata Forward!
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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