Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Database engineering sits at the core of modern SaaS infrastructure, and this role is notable because it targets the internals that make cloud products reliable at scale: storage, query execution, and distributed processing. Work on a “petabyte-scale” system and fault-tolerant architecture signals a platform-oriented environment where product capabilities are constrained—or unlocked—by data-layer performance and correctness.
For a SaaS career, this kind of remit builds durable technical capital. Experience diagnosing scalability bottlenecks, instrumenting systems, and implementing optimizations translates across cloud-native companies that depend on multi-tenant efficiency and predictable performance. The emphasis on reliability and tooling for customer workload visibility also maps to common SaaS priorities: operational excellence, measurable SLAs, and continuous improvement based on real usage patterns.
This role tends to suit engineers who enjoy deep systems problem-solving and are motivated by ambiguity in complex domains rather than feature delivery alone. It aligns well with professionals who want to strengthen fundamentals in concurrency, distributed systems, and performance engineering, and who are comfortable working in lower-level languages in a Linux-heavy environment.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
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’re hiring talented Software Engineers to join the Snowflake Database Engineering team! In this role you will work directly with our team to evolve our elastic, large scale, high-performance data processing system. We need smart engineers who can pick up and understand complex technical areas quickly – and who are enthusiastic about building new technologies!
AS A SOFTWARE ENGINEER AT SNOWFLAKE, YOU WILL:
Design, develop, and support a petabyte-scale cloud database that is highly parallel and fault-tolerant.
Build high-quality and highly reliable software to meet the needs of some of the largest companies on the planet.
Analyze and understand performance and scalability bottlenecks in the system and solve them.
Pinpoint problems, instrument relevant components as needed, and ultimately implement solutions.
Design and implement novel query optimization or distributed data processing algorithms which allow Snowflake to provide industry leading data warehousing capabilities.
Design and implement the new service architecture required to enable the Snowflake Data Cloud
Develop tools for improving our customers' insights into their workloads.
OUR IDEAL SOFTWARE ENGINEER WILL HAVE:
2+ years industry experience working on commercial or open-source software.
Fluency in Java or C++.
Familiarity with development in a Linux environment.
Excellent problem solving skills, and strong CS fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems.
Systems programming skills including multi-threading, concurrency, etc.
Experience with implementation testing, debugging and documentation.
Bachelor’s degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Software Engineering or related field; Masters or PhD preferred.
Ability to work on-site in our Menlo Park / Bellevue / Berlin office.
BONUS POINTS FOR EXPERIENCE WITH THE FOLLOWING:
SQL or other database technologies including internal design and implementation.
Query optimization, query execution, compiler design and implementation.
Experience with internals of distributed key value stores like FoundationDB and storage engines like RocksDB, InnoDB, BerkeleyDB etc.
Experience with MySQL, PostgreSQL internals
Data warehouse design, database systems, and large-scale data processing solutions like Hadoop and Spark.
Large scale distributed systems, transactions and consistency models.
Experience in database replication technology
Big data storage technologies and their applications, e.g., HDFS, Cassandra, Columnar Databases, etc.
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
