Staff Software Engineer - Snowhouse
Snowflake is hiring a Staff Software Engineer - Snowhouse in Menlo Park, 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 Little AI ●○○○: aI is not part of the work.
- Pay on this posting starts 41% higher than the typical software engineer posting on Level.
- The posting mentions distributed systems, data engineering and software engineering among its tools and skills.
- Level classes it as a senior role.
- Snowflake has 356 other open roles on Level.
AI in this role
Design and scale petabyte-scale data warehouse infrastructure and pipelines using AI-assisted engineering practices.
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.
Staff Software Engineer - Snowhouse Foundation
About the Team
The Snowhouse Foundation team builds our globally distributed data warehouse, managing vast petabyte-scale datasets that are continuously ingested, processed, and replicated across all Snowflake environments and external data sources. Snowhouse powers Snowflake's core business, engineering, and data science operations while delivering critical customer visibility into global account activities, usage, and resource consumption. The team drives critical investments in core data processing infrastructure, high-performance data export/ingestion, optimized data layout and compliance, and Snowflake's system database and applications.
A successful candidate will:
Deeply understand the inner workings of Snowflake and the needs of our users, exhibiting a healthy curiosity for use cases and needs that will inform future technical strategy, anticipating needs rather than reacting to them.
Be highly productive by leveraging AI-assisted engineering, empowering and creating opportunities for others, and effectively leading at scale.
Show a natural inclination to partner across teams to deliver improvements on cross-team concerns such as reliability and efficiency.
Responsibilities
Technical Leadership: Provide hands-on guidance and code reviews, develop other engineers and raise the quality bar, establish engineering best practices across the team and contribute to the team strategy and future of the platform.
Technical Execution: Design and implement highly available distributed platforms, pipelines, and data infrastructure components to scale global data processing. Solve hard problems, use AI-assisted engineering responsibly to improve velocity and quality.
Problem-space Ownership: Lead cross-functional engineering projects from idea inception through implementation and production deployment across multiple quarters and teams. Develop a deep understanding of the underlying user and company needs.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with product managers, senior ICs, data science teams, and business units to deliver end-to-end data platform capabilities.
Platform Ownership: Own or co-own the reliability, observability, SLOs, capacity, and durable remediation goals for their problem space.
Qualifications
Experience: 12+ years of software development experience in distributed systems, with a strong focus on data warehouse or data infrastructure engineering.
Cloud Infrastructure: Deep experience developing resilient, large-scale services in public cloud environments (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
Technical Depth: Demonstrated proficiency in distributed systems architecture and database fundamentals, with a track record of solving complex system design challenges.
Communication: Excellent technical communication and collaborative problem-solving skills across multidisciplinary teams.
Bonus Skills: Familiarity with data or ML orchestration systems across diverse architectures.
Education: BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience).
Every Snowflake employee is expected to follow the company’s confidentiality and security standards for handling sensitive data. Snowflake employees must abide by the company’s data security plan as an essential part of their duties. It is every employee’s duty to keep customer information secure and confidential.
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
Staff Software Engineer - Snowhouse at Snowflake rates 30 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Little AI (AI Level 1 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Little AI. AI is not part of the work.
- ●●●● 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
- $167k
This posting starts 41% above the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs
Questions you could be asked
- Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where data engineering was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where software engineering was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where ai assisted engineering was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where scalability was part of your work. What did you do?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: Distributed Systems, Data Engineering, Software Engineering, AI Assisted Engineering, and Scalability. 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.
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