Principal Software Engineer - Performance Engineering
Leads Snowflake’s cloud infrastructure performance strategy by evaluating new hardware, building benchmark and validation systems, and translating performance data into pricing, capacity, and rollout decisions. Requires 12+ years in performance, systems, or infrastructure engineering and deep cloud hardware expertise.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Lead evaluation and enablement of new AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud instance types, including Graviton, AMD Turin, Azure ARM/Cobalt, and GCP Axion.
- Set performance strategy, technical roadmaps, and measurement methodologies; translate benchmark results into rollout and adoption recommendations.
- Partner with engineering, capacity, finance, cloud providers, and silicon vendors to qualify new hardware and influence future instance designs.
- Analyze CPU microarchitecture, memory bandwidth, PMU counters, and I/O behavior to identify workload bottlenecks and drive resolution.
- Develop price/performance models supporting hardware transitions.
- Build automated performance-validation workflows and per-provider, per-instance scorecards for day-zero hardware readiness.
- Mentor engineers, expand benchmarking capabilities, and promote performance-engineering education.
Requirements
- 12+ years of experience in performance engineering, systems engineering, or infrastructure engineering, with principal-level technical leadership.
- Deep expertise in cloud infrastructure performance across at least one major cloud service provider, including instance types, pricing models, and capacity constraints.
- Strong hardware and systems fundamentals, including CPU microarchitecture, memory bandwidth, I/O subsystems, and profiling tools such as PMU counters.
- Experience building or operating large-scale benchmarking systems and converting benchmark output into pricing and rollout decisions.
- Ability to build quantitative models connecting technical performance metrics to business outcomes.
- Experience leading cross-functional and cross-company initiatives and serving as a technical point of contact for cloud and hardware partners.
- Bias toward automation, including scorecards, dashboards, and validation pipelines.
Nice to Have
- Experience with data warehouse or distributed database performance.
- Experience partnering with cloud providers or silicon vendors on early-access hardware programs.
- Experience building hardware-emulation systems.
Skills
AWS, Microsoft Azure, GCP, Cpu Microarchitecture, Memory Bandwidth, I/O Subsystems, Pmu Counters, Benchmarking, Performance Modeling, Price/Performance Modeling, Distributed Databases, Automation, Dashboards, Validation Pipelines
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