Principal Software Engineer II, Data Platform
Leads architecture and hands-on development for Snowflake’s declarative data platform, specializing in streaming ingestion, incremental processing, and dynamic tables. The role requires 14+ years of software engineering experience, deep distributed-systems expertise, and the ability to influence technical direction across organizations.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Drive the technical strategy and architecture for key Data Platform initiatives, focusing on real-time data movement and incremental processing.
- Lead design reviews and set engineering standards across teams.
- Identify and resolve high-impact technical challenges and systemic bottlenecks to reduce latency and improve the efficiency of dynamic tables at cloud scale.
- Mentor and grow senior engineers and raise the engineering bar.
- Partner closely with product and infrastructure leadership on roadmap and direction.
- Deliver hands-on technical work in the most critical areas.
Requirements
- 14+ years of software engineering experience with deep expertise in distributed systems.
- Demonstrated track record of defining and delivering platform-scale technical initiatives.
- Expert-level knowledge of streaming and/or batch data systems, such as Flink, Spark, or equivalent, with specialized knowledge in incremental materialization algorithms.
- Strong systems thinking and the ability to reason across infrastructure, storage, compute, and API layers.
- Passion for engaging directly with customers to gain insight and inspiration.
- Experience influencing technical direction across organizations.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills for technical and executive audiences.
Nice-to-haves
- Experience with AI-augmented development practices and integrating LLM-based tooling into engineering workflows.
- Familiarity with Snowflake platform internals or cloud-native data systems.
- Experience with metadata systems, query optimization, or data catalog infrastructure.
- Contributions to open source projects, such as top-level Apache projects.
Skills
Distributed Systems, Streaming Data, Batch Data Systems, Apache Flink, Spark, Incremental Materialization, Systems Architecture, Real-Time Data Processing, Cloud-Native Data Systems, Metadata Systems, Query Optimization, Data Catalogs, Llm Tooling
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