Principal Engineer - Metadata

Snowflake is about empowering enterprises to achieve their full potential - and people too. With a culture that's all in on impact, innovation, and collaboration, Snowflake is the sweet spot for building big, moving fast, and taking technology - and careers - to the next level.

We are the Snowflake Metadata team. We own Snowflake's metadata systems that make it easy for customers to query, modify and manage their petabyte-scale data. We develop distributed systems that store and maintain metadata, transaction frameworks that power Snowflake's query and DML capabilities, asynchronous systems that provide time travel and lifecycle management capabilities and entity metadata supporting DDL capabilities. We also build foundational capabilities that deliver global features like cross-region replication (Snowgrid), data sharing, and data marketplace.

Our mission is to build the next generation Metadata Platform that will significantly unlock new capabilities for Snowflake across Iceberg, unstructured data and extending Snowflake's enterprise capabilities. Your work will drive industry leading innovation on Iceberg, Analytics, Data Engineering and AI.

• Solve real business needs at large scale by applying your software engineering and analytical problem solving skills.

• Design, develop and support fault-tolerant scalable distributed systems for Metadata.

• Create and own architecture and design, influence our product roadmap, and identify new projects that will ensure Snowflake creates the best technology for our customers.

• Analyze fault-tolerance and high availability issues, performance and scale challenges, and solve them.

• Mentor and grow junior engineers.

• Understand trade-offs between consistency, performance and costs to build solutions which can meet the demands of rapidly growing services.

• Ensure operational readiness of the services and meet the commitments to our customers regarding durability, availability and performance.

• 15+ years of industry experience designing, building and supporting large scale distributed services.

• Deep and broad expertise in a variety of database systems internals including metadata management, clustering, compaction, catalogs, storage and replication.

• Strong computer science fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems.

• Excellent understanding of systems infrastructure product development and concepts including multi-threading, memory management, networking and storage, performance, reliability and scalability.

• Fluency in Java or other similar procedural object-oriented language is preferred.

• Track record of identifying and implementing creative solutions to complex problems at the cloud scale.

• Ability to work effectively across engineering teams in multiple locations

• BS in Computer Science; Advanced degree preferred.

• Build an industry-leading Cloud Data and AI Platform.

• Solve challenging technical problems related to security, parallel and distributed systems, programming, resource management, large-scale system maintenance, and more!

• Work closely with our customers & partners, understand their use cases & needs, think strategically to seek the right problem to solve at the right time, and innovate with rigor.

• Join a world-class team of both industry veterans and rising stars.

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

The following represents the expected range of compensation for this role:

• The estimated base salary range for this role is $268,000 - $437,000.
• Additionally, this role is eligible to participate in Snowflake's bonus and equity plan.

The successful candidate's starting salary will be determined based on permissible, non-discriminatory factors such as skills, experience, and geographic location. This role is also eligible for a competitive benefits package that includes: medical, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance; 401(k) retirement plan; flexible spending & health savings account; at least 12 paid holidays; paid time off; parental leave; employee assistance program; and other company benefits.

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