Staff Software Engineer

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.