Skip to content
SnowflakeSnowflakeBellevue, WA

Staff Software Engineer — Dynamic Tables, Performance

Leads design and implementation of performance improvements for Snowflake's Dynamic Tables incremental view maintenance engine, focusing on complex query shapes, scalability, and cost-efficiency. Requires 10+ years in large-scale data systems with expertise in query optimization or stream processing, plus C++/Java proficiency.

236k – 339k/yr
Hybrid10+ YOEBackend Engineering

About the role

What You'll Do

  • Lead the design and implementation of performance improvements to the incremental view maintenance engine, including multi-join incrementalization, novel incrementalization semantics, incremental window functions, and stacked operations.
  • Help define the roadmap for the incremental view maintenance engine, identifying key performance, scalability, and correctness milestones, prioritizing high-impact enhancements, and aligning technical investments with product and research goals.
  • Collaborate across teams to co-design improvements that benefit incremental pipelines.
  • Mentor engineers, drive design reviews, and raise the technical bar for the team through architectural leadership and high-quality code.
  • Contribute to the research and publication roadmap; the team has an active presence at top-tier database conferences (SIGMOD, VLDB).

What We're Looking For

  • 10+ years of experience building and optimizing large-scale data systems, with deep expertise in at least one of: query optimization, incremental/stream processing, or materialized view maintenance.
  • Strong computer science fundamentals — algorithms, data structures, and distributed systems design.
  • Proficiency in C++ or Java; experience with systems-level performance analysis (profiling, benchmarking, regression detection).
  • Demonstrated ability to lead multi-engineer, cross-team technical initiatives and translate ambiguous problem spaces into concrete engineering plans.
  • Experience operating systems at cloud scale (multi-tenant SaaS, petabyte-scale data, thousands of concurrent workloads).
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills; ability to present complex technical trade-offs to both engineering and product audiences.

Nice to Have

  • Experience with a major analytical DBMS (BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks, Teradata, Oracle, SQL Server).
  • Familiarity with stream processing algorithms.
  • Experience with CDC pipelines, data lake architectures (Iceberg, Delta), or the broader data engineering ecosystem (dbt, Airflow, Fivetran).
  • Advanced degree (MS or PhD) in Computer Science, with emphasis on database systems.

Skills

C++JavaSQLQuery OptimizationIncremental View MaintenanceStream ProcessingMaterialized ViewsDistributed SystemsAlgorithmsData StructuresProfilingBenchmarkingBigQueryRedshiftIceberg

Similar roles

Backend Engineering jobs
Snowflake

Staff Software Engineer

SnowflakeMenlo Park, CA +1

Staff Software Engineer building and scaling Snowflake's cloud-agnostic FDB distributed transactional key-value store that powers all Snowflake products. Design autoscaling infrastructure, next-gen transaction/caching/storage systems, and multi-tenant capabilities for AWS, Azure, and GCP.

236k – 339k/yr
On-site8+ YOEBackend Engineering
Snowflake

Staff Software Engineer

SnowflakeMenlo Park, CA

Design and implement query optimization and distributed data processing algorithms for Snowflake's petabyte-scale cloud database. Own end-to-end delivery of large-scale systems projects and mentor junior engineers.

236k – 339k/yr
Hybrid10+ YOEBackend Engineering
Snowflake

Staff Software Engineer - Parameters

SnowflakeBellevue, WA

Lead development of Snowflake's feature flagging and experimentation platform. Build scalable frameworks, APIs, and infrastructure used across engineering teams to enable safe, performant feature releases.

236k – 339k/yr
On-site8+ YOEBackend Engineering
Snowflake

Staff Softare Engineer, Cortex AI Infrastructure

SnowflakeMenlo Park, CA

Builds scalable backend infrastructure for Snowflake's Cortex AI products, including agentic runtimes, RAG systems, evals engines, and productionized AI workflows. Requires 5+ years in distributed systems and proficiency in Go/Java/Python.

236k – 339k/yr
On-site5+ YOEBackend Engineering
Confluent

Staff Software Engineer - Flink Control Plane

ConfluentUnited States

Develops Flink control plane services for job lifecycle orchestration, Kubernetes operators for serverless management, and APIs for multi-tenancy. Requires 10+ years experience in distributed systems, Kubernetes, and cloud-native infrastructure.

236k – 277k/yr
Remote10+ YOEBackend Engineering