Staff Software Engineer, Cortex AI Infrastructure

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

Staff Software Engineer focused on building and scaling the backend infrastructure for agentic AI enterprise products, including orchestration engines, RAG systems, and evaluation infrastructure.

What you'd actually do

  1. Build and scale the orchestration engines that execute complex agentic workflows, ensuring low-latency tool execution and robust state management.
  2. Design high-performance systems for RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), including vector database integration, scalable and efficient search indexing, query processing, and result ranking, semantic caching, and automated metadata extraction.
  3. Develop the automated infrastructure required to run massive-scale golden set simulations, error analysis pipelines, and "hillclimbing" experiments.
  4. Collaborate with the modeling team to take raw LLM capabilities and turn them into hardened, multi-tenant microservices with strict guardrails and observability.
  5. Direct the infra strategy for model routing, prompt caching, and token optimization to ensure Snowflake’s AI features are the most efficient in the industry.

Skills

Required

  • Go or Java
  • Python
  • distributed systems
  • high-throughput APIs
  • backend infrastructure for AI/ML products
  • database internals
  • distributed state management
  • cloud-native architecture
  • Kubernetes
  • FoundationDB

Nice to have

  • Query optimization
  • SQL engine internals
  • Designing multi-tenant systems
  • Developing search infrastructure
  • vector indices
  • agent platforms
  • building scalable data pipelines

What the JD emphasized

  • building distributed systems
  • backend infrastructure for AI/ML products
  • AI orchestration
  • vector indices
  • agent platforms
  • building scalable data pipelines

Other signals

  • building the high-performance systems that orchestrate them
  • own and influence the architecture for agent execution environments
  • high-throughput context retrieval
  • ecosystem that allows our customers to iterate and launch agents in production