Principal Software Engineer
Snowflake is hiring a Principal Software Engineer for a remote role open to applicants in United States. It pays $236k-$339k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Snowflake.
Level's read on this job
- Level rates this software engineer role Works on AI ●●●○: the daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- Pay on this posting starts 40% higher than the typical software engineer posting on Level.
- This is listed as a remote role.
- The posting mentions software engineering, frontend infrastructure and developer tooling among its tools and skills.
- Snowflake has 354 other open roles on Level.
AI in this role
Design and build AI-first platforms and developer tooling to improve developer experience and agentic workflows in Snowsight.
At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise. To usher in this new era, we seek AI-native thinkers across every function who are energized by the opportunity to reinvent how they work. You don’t just use tools; you possess an innate curiosity, treating AI as a high-trust collaborator that is core to how you solve problems and accelerate your impact. We look for low-ego individuals who thrive in dynamic and fast-moving environments and move with an experimental mindset — who rapidly test emerging capabilities to discover simpler, more powerful ways to deliver results. At Snowflake, your role isn't just to execute a function, but to help redefine the future of how work gets done.
About the Team
The Apps & Experiences (AppEx) organization powers the unified user experience (Snowsight) for Snowflake. Every major Snowflake customer interacts with our platform through these surfaces, making AppEx central to both customer satisfaction and revenue growth.
Within Appex, our team sits at the intersection of AI, platform, and user experience. We are on a mission to create an AI‑first, scalable, maintainable, and extensible platform to build all Snowflake user experience features. The team owns:
The serving layer that powers Snowsight, Snowflake CoWork, and UX features
Developer tooling that enable our engineers to move fast and deliver
Frontend infrastructure and shared services for product teams
CI pipelines that ensure fast and reliable builds
Testing and validation platform that maintains code and product quality
The monitoring and logging stack that ensures observability and trust
What You Will Do
As a software engineer on the team, you will play a central role in delivering the next generation of tools and evolve our developer infrastructure and tooling to be scalable, highly performant, and AI-first.
Design and build AI-first platforms, tools, and best practices to significantly enhance the developer experience for Snowsight
Drive strategy and initiatives to improve agentic development workflows and build infrastructure to support 10x increases in developer productivity
Improve platform reliability by investing in observability, alerting, SLOs, and automated remediation across our systems.
Collaborate with product managers, architects, other engineering teams, and business groups, to drive end-to-end solutions.
Contribute to improving our engineering processes, tooling, and standards.
What We’re Looking For
Our ideal Principal Software Engineer will have:
Strong passion for making developers highly productive.
12+ years industry experience developing tools for large codebases.
Passion for AI-first processes and for building platforms that enable many teams to move faster while keeping systems maintainable and safe.
Experience with or strong interest in AI or LLM-based applications (agents, prompt/tool engineering, evals, or productionized AI features)
Experience working on enterprise-grade build systems.
Excellent problem solving skills, and strong CS fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems.
Fluency in Go, Java, or Python.
Ability to work in a team environment, collaborate well, and mentor junior engineers.
A strategic mindset and strong sense of what to prioritize for maximum impact.
Excellent interpersonal communication skills.
Outstanding written and oral English language skills
Ability to work on-site at our Bellevue, WA or Menlo Park, CA offices.
If you’re excited about building the platform and AI systems that power how the world’s largest companies experience Snowflake, we’d love to hear from you.
Snowflake is growing fast, and we’re scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth. We are looking for people who share our values, challenge ordinary thinking, and push the pace of innovation while building a future for themselves and Snowflake.
How do you want to make your impact?
For jobs located in the United States, please visit the job posting on the Snowflake Careers Site for salary and benefits information: careers.snowflake.com
How we rate this
Principal Software Engineer at Snowflake rates 60 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Also common in software engineer jobs at this level
Pay
- This job starts at
- $236k
- Typical software engineer job
- $168k
This posting starts 40% above the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs
Questions you could be asked
- Tell me about a project where software engineering was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where frontend infrastructure was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where developer tooling was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where ci/cd was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where observability was part of your work. What did you do?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: Software Engineering, Frontend Infrastructure, Developer Tooling, CI/CD, and Observability. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Show where AI is part of your daily process, not a one-off project. This role expects it to be a running habit.
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