# Principal Software Engineer - Performance Engineering (Cloud Infrastructure) at Snowflake

- Company: Snowflake
- What the company does: Snowflake powers AI, data engineering, applications, and analytics on a trusted, scalable AI Data Cloud—eliminating silos and accelerating innovation. Backed by Sequoia.
- Company website: https://www.snowflake.net/
- Type: Startups
- Level: Principal and up
- Location: US-CA-Menlo Park
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $264K to $380K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-09-17
- Apply by: 2026-11-01
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/snowflake/351f89c9-7502-4c5c-b600-b3a1192c45eb
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/snowflake-principal-software-engineer-performance-engineering-cloud-infrastructu/

## 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)

Tags: Engineering