Principal Software Engineer - Postgresql

Snowflake Snowflake · Data AI · CA-Menlo Park, United States · Engineering

Principal Software Engineer for Snowflake's cloud-native Postgres service, focusing on architecture, performance, and scalability within the context of an 'agentic enterprise' and an 'AI Platform'. The role emphasizes building and operating large-scale distributed systems and databases.

What you'd actually do

  1. Serve as the technical leader on our most critical, cross-functional projects.
  2. Break problems down and build consensus across multiple parties to reach solutions that are scalable, tractable, and timely.
  3. Function as both a problem solver and a problem finder by building the roadmap while delivering it.
  4. Leverage your experience to balance long-term thinking with more immediate business needs.
  5. Understand trade-offs between consistency, performance, scaling limits, and costs to build solutions which can meet the demands of rapidly growing services.

Skills

Required

  • 10+ years building and operating large-scale distributed systems, databases, or cloud services
  • Appreciation of Postgres
  • solid understanding of database fundamentals
  • Strong systems programming experience
  • Experience building high-availability, multi-tenant, or highly distributed data systems
  • Comfortable navigating large, complex codebases
  • leading cross-team architecture efforts
  • A track record of driving projects from concept to production with measurable impact
  • Excellent communication skills
  • ability to influence across engineering and product organizations

Nice to have

  • Ruby experience

What the JD emphasized

  • large-scale distributed systems
  • high-availability, multi-tenant, or highly distributed data systems
  • large, complex codebases
  • leading cross-team architecture efforts
  • driving projects from concept to production with measurable impact