Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Principal Software Engineer role sits at the infrastructure layer of a mature SaaS platform, focused on the system database and internal data warehouse that underpin product visibility and operational decision-making. In the SaaS ecosystem, that combination is notable because it connects customer-facing usage insights with the behind-the-scenes pipelines that ingest, replicate, and organize data across environments and external sources.
Career-wise, the work maps closely to skills that travel across modern SaaS companies: designing highly available distributed services, improving efficiency in data movement, and building platforms that other teams rely on for analytics and product logic. The remit spans end-to-end delivery, from early design through productionization, and includes collaboration with product, architecture, and data science stakeholders, which is common in SaaS organizations where data systems directly influence roadmap and customer experience.
This role is best suited for senior engineers who prefer owning foundational systems rather than isolated features, and who enjoy pairing deep technical execution with technical leadership. It will fit professionals motivated by hard distributed-systems problems, cloud-scale reliability, and building internal platforms that enable many downstream teams to move with clarity and consistency.
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.
The Snowhouse Foundation team builds our globally distributed data warehouse. We manage a vast array of petabyte scale data sets that are continuously ingested, processed and replicated from across all Snowflake environments and external data sources. Snowhouse powers all of Snowflake’s core business, engineering and data science needs and provides customers with full visibility into their account activities, usage, and resource consumption from all their global environments. The team is investing in multiple critical areas, including a pipeline authoring platform, high performance/high efficiency data export, ingestion and data layout. Our team is also responsible for a fundamental product for Snowflake’s customers: the Snowflake system database/application that provides customers with all usage insights they need to reason about their global Snowflake footprint as well as 1st party business logic such as ML powered functions and Budgeting applications.
AS A PRINCIPAL SOFTWARE ENGINEER IN SNOWHOUSE FOUNDATION, YOU WILL:
Design and implement innovative highly available distributed platforms and pipelines and enhance the overall Snowflake data infrastructure
Lead and drive projects from idea formulation to design, implementation and successful productionization.
Collaborate with product managers, architects, other engineering teams, data science organizations, business groups, on end to end solutions.
Provide strong technical leadership to the team and partner teams.
Enable the data science organization, business groups, engineering teams to build comprehensive analytics quickly and effectively.
OUR IDEAL CANDIDATE WILL HAVE:
15+ years of experience in distributed systems, some of which are in data warehouse or data infrastructure software development.
Strong track record of delivering large scale and resilient distributed systems and services.
Extensive and strong development experience in cloud environments, such as AWS, Azure, and GCP.
Strong collaboration and communication skills.
Experience in distributed systems and databases.
Experience in ML is a plus.
Strong hands-on skills. Can dive deep into the complex system design and implementation when needed.
BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or related majors, or equivalent experience.
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
