Staff Software Engineer — Dynamic Tables, Performance
236k – 339kBellevue, WAHybrid10+ YOE
Summary
Leads design and implementation of performance improvements for Snowflake's Dynamic Tables incremental view maintenance engine, focusing on complex query shapes, scalability, and cost-efficiency. Requires 10+ years in large-scale data systems with expertise in query optimization or stream processing, plus C++/Java proficiency.
About the role
What You'll Do
- Lead the design and implementation of performance improvements to the incremental view maintenance engine, including multi-join incrementalization, novel incrementalization semantics, incremental window functions, and stacked operations.
- Help define the roadmap for the incremental view maintenance engine, identifying key performance, scalability, and correctness milestones, prioritizing high-impact enhancements, and aligning technical investments with product and research goals.
- Collaborate across teams to co-design improvements that benefit incremental pipelines.
- Mentor engineers, drive design reviews, and raise the technical bar for the team through architectural leadership and high-quality code.
- Contribute to the research and publication roadmap; the team has an active presence at top-tier database conferences (SIGMOD, VLDB).
What We're Looking For
- 10+ years of experience building and optimizing large-scale data systems, with deep expertise in at least one of: query optimization, incremental/stream processing, or materialized view maintenance.
- Strong computer science fundamentals — algorithms, data structures, and distributed systems design.
- Proficiency in C++ or Java; experience with systems-level performance analysis (profiling, benchmarking, regression detection).
- Demonstrated ability to lead multi-engineer, cross-team technical initiatives and translate ambiguous problem spaces into concrete engineering plans.
- Experience operating systems at cloud scale (multi-tenant SaaS, petabyte-scale data, thousands of concurrent workloads).
- Strong written and verbal communication skills; ability to present complex technical trade-offs to both engineering and product audiences.
Nice to Have
- Experience with a major analytical DBMS (BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks, Teradata, Oracle, SQL Server).
- Familiarity with stream processing algorithms.
- Experience with CDC pipelines, data lake architectures (Iceberg, Delta), or the broader data engineering ecosystem (dbt, Airflow, Fivetran).
- Advanced degree (MS or PhD) in Computer Science, with emphasis on database systems.
Skills
C++JavaSQLquery optimizationincremental view maintenancestream processingmaterialized viewsdistributed systemsalgorithmsdata structuresprofilingbenchmarkingBigQueryRedshiftIceberg
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