Staff Software Engineer

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.

About the job

Responsibilities

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 projects, including identifying solutions, design, implementation, rigorous testing, and safe production rollout.
Ensure operational readiness and execute production operations of services, meeting 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.

Requirements

10+ years of industry experience working on commercial or open-source software.
Strong fluency in Java or C++.
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.

Nice-to-Haves

SQL or other database technologies including internal design and implementation.
Query optimization, query execution, compiler design and implementation.
Experience with internals of distributed key value stores like FoundationDB and storage engines like RocksDB, InnoDB, BerkeleyDB etc.
Experience with MySQL, PostgreSQL internals.
Data warehouse design, database systems, and large-scale data processing solutions like Hadoop and Spark.
Experience in database replication technology.
Big data storage technologies and their applications, e.g., HDFS, Cassandra, Columnar Databases, etc.