Senior Software Engineer - Observe by Snowflake, Metrics Platform

Snowflake Snowflake · Data AI · Zurich-Observe, Switzerland · Engineering

Senior Software Engineer for Snowflake's Observe platform, focusing on the Metrics Platform. This role involves owning and improving components of the metrics pipeline, contributing to next-generation systems, and resolving customer-reported performance issues. The platform is AI-powered and built on the Snowflake AI Data Cloud.

What you'd actually do

  1. Own and improve components of the metrics pipeline, ingestion, storage, query execution, caching, and numerous optimizations across the stack, based on where you can have the most impact
  2. Contribute to the design of next-generation metrics systems, ensuring current and future work can proceed in parallel
  3. Design and run experiments to validate architectural changes before full implementation, iterating quickly to find the best path
  4. Investigate and resolve customer-reported performance issues in the metrics domain, including acting as a first responder when metrics latency becomes a blocker for deals or retention
  5. Collaborate with the broader Metrics team on cross-cutting concerns, query execution, caching, and pipeline architecture, where metrics work intersects.

Skills

Required

  • 5+ years of industry experience building backend distributed systems
  • Hands-on experience building and optimizing data pipelines, query engines, or storage systems
  • Strong foundations in algorithms, data structures, and distributed systems architecture
  • Ability to rapidly onboard to complex, unfamiliar systems and drive meaningful improvements without needing a long ramp
  • Customer-focused mindset: able to connect backend engineering decisions to real user pain and prioritize accordingly
  • Strong communication skills for working across engineering, product, and customer-facing teams

Nice to have

  • Experience with time-series databases (Prometheus, InfluxDB, TimescaleDB, or similar)
  • Experience with Snowflake or other cloud data warehouses; particularly in optimizing for interactive and low latency query workloads
  • Prior work on observability, monitoring, or telemetry platforms
  • Familiarity with columnar storage formats, inverted indexes, or OLAP query optimization
  • Advanced degree in Computer Science with a focus on databases or systems

What the JD emphasized

  • performance and scalability improvements
  • customer-reported performance issues
  • metrics latency becomes a blocker for deals or retention
  • rigorous analysis across large-scale production workloads
  • getting into the details of a specific system change to make it land correctly
  • building backend distributed systems
  • building and optimizing data pipelines, query engines, or storage systems
  • rapidly onboard to complex, unfamiliar systems and drive meaningful improvements without needing a long ramp
  • connect backend engineering decisions to real user pain and prioritize accordingly