Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Staff Software Engineer role sits at the intersection of two major currents in SaaS: data platforms as the operating layer for modern businesses, and the push to productize AI capabilities rather than keep them as research prototypes. The remit—AI-powered services integrated into a large-scale cloud platform—signals work that affects how customers consume LLM and NLP functionality as part of a broader SaaS ecosystem, not as a standalone model demo.
From a SaaS career perspective, the emphasis on “building and operating” production services highlights the full lifecycle that senior engineers are expected to master in mature cloud products: API and SDK design, versioning and backward compatibility, reliability, and cost-aware performance. The cross-functional coupling with research, product, infrastructure, and security mirrors how AI features typically move from experimentation into durable platform primitives, building transferable judgment around trade-offs and operability.
This role is best suited to an experienced individual contributor who prefers influence through architecture, standards, and technical direction while remaining hands-on. It fits engineers who enjoy ambiguous platform problems, cross-team alignment, and raising engineering quality across multiple services—particularly those motivated by making AI capabilities dependable and consumable at scale within a SaaS platform.
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.
About the role
At Snowflake, we are building the world’s most advanced data and applications platform, enabling organizations to unlock the full potential of their data at a global scale. Our AI team is at the center of this mission, bringing LLMs, multimodal AI, and advanced NLP capabilities directly into the Snowflake Data Cloud.
We are looking for an experienced Staff Software Engineer to provide technical leadership in the design, development, and evolution of AI-powered services that integrate deeply with Snowflake’s architecture. This role goes beyond feature delivery—you will shape system architecture, influence product direction, and raise the technical bar across teams working on LLM- and AI-driven solutions.
This role focuses on building and operating AI-powered services on the Snowflake platform, working closely with research teams to bring AI innovations into reliable, scalable production systems. It is a senior individual contributor role with organization-wide impact, requiring strong ownership, cross-team collaboration, and the ability to drive complex initiatives from concept to production.
Your impact as a Staff Software Engineer
Act as a technical leader and force multiplier, combining hands-on engineering with architectural and strategic influence.
Architect and drive the development of large-scale AI platforms and services, including LLM- and multimodal-based systems integrated into the Snowflake Data Cloud.
Own end-to-end technical design of critical systems across APIs, SDKs, distributed services, control planes, and production deployments.
Lead the resolution of complex, cross-team engineering problems spanning multiple services and organizations.
Define and evolve technical standards, best practices, and architectural patterns for AI-related systems.
Partner closely with research, product, infrastructure, and security teams to translate research and business requirements into scalable, production-ready solutions.
Influence short- and long-term platform strategy through architectural reviews, technical roadmaps, and prioritization decisions.
Mentor engineers to raise technical quality and decision-making maturity across teams.
Serve as a technical advisor to leadership, clearly articulating trade-offs, risks, and system-level implications.
Drive operational excellence across reliability, security, performance, and cost efficiency.
What we’re looking for
8+ years of experience building and operating production-grade, distributed systems at scale.
Expert-level backend development skills, with Python strongly preferred.
Proven experience designing and owning public-facing SDKs and service APIs (REST and/or gRPC), including versioning, backward compatibility, and reliability.
Strong foundation in distributed systems, including concurrency, fault tolerance, scalability, and performance optimization.
Hands-on experience building AI/ML platforms, such as model inference services, data pipelines, feature stores, or AI-centric APIs.
Solid understanding of LLM and NLP system requirements (latency, throughput, observability, cost controls) and ability to bring research prototypes to production.
Deep familiarity with modern software engineering practices, including CI/CD, automated testing, infrastructure as code, Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud-native deployments.
Strong focus on operability and reliability, including monitoring, alerting, debugging, and incident response.
Experience designing or operating control-plane and data-plane services is a strong plus.
Demonstrated technical leadership through influence, with a strong mentoring track record and ability to drive alignment across teams.
Ability to clearly communicate complex technical concepts to senior leadership and non-engineering stakeholders and make high-impact decisions under ambiguity.
MSc in a relevant technical field (Computer Science, AI/ML, Data Science, Mathematics, Physics, or related); PhD a plus.
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
