Snowflake powers AI, data engineering, applications, and analytics on a trusted, scalable AI Data Cloud—eliminating silos and accelerating innovation. Backed by Sequoia.
About the role
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.
What they're looking for
- 12+ years of experience in performance engineering, systems engineering, or infrastructure engineering, with a track record of principal-level technical leadership
- Deep expertise in cloud infrastructure performance across at least one major CSP (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including instance types, pricing models, and capacity constraints
- Strong grounding in hardware/systems fundamentals: CPU microarchitecture, memory bandwidth, I/O subsystems, and use of profiling tools (PMU counters, etc.) to root-cause performance bottlenecks
- Experience building or operating large-scale benchmarking systems (e.g., TPC-DS-style workloads) and turning benchmark output into actionable optimization strategies and pricing/rollout decisions
- Ability to build quantitative models connecting technical performance metrics to business outcomes (pricing multipliers, cost-per-query)
- A track record of leading cross-functional, cross-company initiatives — comfortable being the primary technical point of contact with external hardware and cloud partners (CSPs, silicon vendors)
More about this role
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.
Principal Software Engineer — Performance Engineering (Cloud Infrastructure)
Engineering Location: Menlo Park
About the Team
The Capacity, Performance & Efficiency team sits at the intersection of cloud infrastructure, workload behavior, performance measurement, and business economics. We drive Snowflake’s cloud infrastructure adoption and evolution strategy, price/performance decisions, platform footprint expansion amidst capacity constraints, and strategic alignment with cloud service...
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