# Senior Software Engineer, Cortex Quality

**Company:** [Snowflake](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/snowflake)
**Location:** Menlo Park, CA
**Role:** ML Engineering
**Salary:** $200k – $270k/yr
**Experience:** 6+ years
**Skills:** Python, TypeScript, Go, AI, LLMs, evaluation harnesses, llm observability, prompt caching, RAG, Data Engineering, Data Modeling, Analytics, semantic layers, production systems
**Posted:** 2026-08-13

> Owns the quality, efficiency, and reliability of Cortex Code, Snowflake’s coding agent for data workflows. The role combines production software engineering, AI/LLM evaluation, experimentation, observability, and systems optimization, requiring 6+ years of experience and proficiency in Python, TypeScript, or Go.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Take coding agents from prototype to production for real coding and data-engineering workflows.
- Design and refine agent behaviors and improve production reliability.
- Build evaluation harnesses and diagnose failure modes from real agent trajectories.
- Run experiments to improve agent quality metrics.
- Reduce cost and latency through prompt caching, context compaction, tool-result offloading, and cheaper model routing for subtasks.
- Debug production failures and create regression tests to improve robustness.
- Build data pipelines that feed real-world task insights into evaluations and modeling.
- Onboard and evaluate frontier models, measuring their strengths and failure modes.
- Partner with product and infrastructure teams to shape user-facing agent behavior and define success metrics for complex tasks.

## Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Statistics, or a related field.
- 6+ years of experience shipping software in production, including AI/LLM features.
- Fluency in at least one of Python, TypeScript, or Go, with willingness to work across all three.
- Measurement-first, systems-thinking approach focused on user outcomes and rigorous evaluation design, including sampling, ground-truth quality, leakage, and noise.
- Comfort debugging complex, unpredictable, real-world failures.
- Strong communication and collaboration skills across engineering, product, and leadership.

## Nice to Have
- Hands-on experience with agentic coding tools and intuition for model strengths, failure modes, and prompting limits.
- Experience with evaluation harnesses, LLM observability, or production safety and guardrails.
- Background in data engineering, data modeling, analytics, retrieval/RAG, or semantic layers.
- Experience working with large-scale datasets or production system logs.
- Experience building and owning complex pipelines, orchestration systems, or software with substantial state, branching logic, and operational requirements.

## Compensation
- Annual salary range: $200,000–$270,000.
- Salary and benefits information for U.S. jobs is available on the Snowflake Careers Site.

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