# Staff Software Engineer, Cortex AI Search 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 (AI role)
- Level: Senior
- Location: US-CA-Menlo Park
- Work setup: Remote
- Pay: $236K to $339K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-09-17
- Apply by: 2026-11-01
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/snowflake/a1f1779b-464c-48f6-a664-56314825c8ac
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/snowflake-staff-software-engineer-cortex-ai-search-infrastructure/

## About the role

Architect Agentic Runtimes: Build and scale the orchestration engines that execute complex agentic workflows, ensuring low-latency tool execution and robust state management. Scale Context Engineering Infra: 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.

## What they're looking for

- Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field
- Experience: 9 + years of experience building distributed systems , high-throughput APIs, or backend infrastructure for AI/ML products
- Technical Stack: Deep proficiency in Go or Java (for systems) and Python (for AI orchestration)
- Systems Thinking: Strong understanding of database internals, distributed state management, and cloud-native architecture (Kubernetes, FoundationDB, etc.)
- Domain Expertise: Familiarity with the "plumbing" of AI: vector indices, agent platforms, and building scalable data pipelines
- Query optimization and SQL engine internals

Tags: Engineering