Senior Software Engineer - Observe by Snowflake, Streaming Data Products

Responsibilities

• Own the data modeling product surface — the APIs, schemas, and abstractions through which customers create tables, views, and materialized views that unify their telemetry for correlation and querying, designed for high-performance execution at scale
• Design the right abstractions for how customers create and manage queryable data — from streaming materialized views to reference tables to log-derived metrics — each serving different needs but composing under one coherent, evolvable model
• Define freshness and staleness semantics that let customers trust their materialized views are current, and design the controls to tune the trade-off between query latency and compute cost
• Design APIs with strong schema taste: versioning, backwards compatibility, polymorphic data models, and clean contracts between systems
• Drive requirements and shape the execution engine based on what the product surface needs
• Layer complexity so an SRE gets a useful table from opinionated defaults in minutes, while a data engineer can express multi-stage pipelines with custom joins, windowing, and time-based aggregations
• Lead a team technically — setting architectural direction, writing production code, and mentoring engineers

Requirements

• 7+ years of software engineering experience with deep expertise in databases, SQL, stream processing, or data pipeline systems
• Deep knowledge of data processing or streaming internals — late-arriving data, backfill and reprocessing on schema changes, event-time vs. processing-time semantics — with experience building products and applications on top of them
• Demonstrated experience designing and shipping APIs with strong taste in DB schema design, versioning, and developer ergonomics
• An architect's mental model — you think in systems, interfaces, contracts, and long-term evolution rather than short-term hacks
• A strong sense of user empathy and product intuition — you think beyond APIs and care about how customers define and query their data
• Proficiency in Go or another systems language, with ability to write production-grade distributed systems code

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience building customer-facing data modeling or pipeline authoring products
• Hands-on experience with streaming semantics in production: watermarks, windowing, ordering, delivery guarantees, late-arriving data
• Background in designing or extending query languages, schema DSLs, or transformation DAG semantics
• Prior work building internal data platforms that turned raw event streams into curated, queryable tables for internal teams
• Familiarity with Apache Iceberg, open table formats, or data lakehouse architectures