Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Staff Software Engineer role sits at a core SaaS inflection point: applied performance work that connects real customer workloads to product architecture in a large cloud data platform. In the Snowflake context, the Applied Performance Group operates where platform capabilities, competitive benchmarks, and enterprise adoption meet, making the work closely tied to how a SaaS product proves value in production environments.
For a long-term SaaS engineering career, the role builds durable strengths in diagnosing system behavior under load, translating findings into product improvements, and communicating tradeoffs across engineering, product, and go to market partners. Experience with workload profiling, benchmarking, and cross cloud data stacks tends to transfer well across modern SaaS companies that monetize reliability, efficiency, and predictable performance as part of the product.
This position best fits an engineer who prefers ambiguous, high leverage problems over feature delivery alone, and who enjoys moving between deep technical analysis and stakeholder alignment. It will appeal to someone comfortable being an internal advisor, working across teams, and developing an external view of the market through competitor and industry benchmark work.
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 Applied Performance Group (APG) Engineering team provides a highly strategic function at Snowflake, with direct impact to our product direction, as well as to our bottom line. APG engineers are a key bridge between Engineering and our Sales organization, support organization, and other engineering organizations at Snowflake. They are called on to help with our most challenging customer performance issues, and help deliver some of our biggest deals. In addition, APG plays a strategic role in competitive benchmarking, defining and/or utilizing industry benchmarks to compare Snowflake performance against our competitors.
APG Engineers are at the cutting edge of innovation at Snowflake, pioneering Snowflake deployments with the newest technology and working with Engineering and Product Management to continuously improve the product and ensure we continue building the best Cloud Data Platform in the industry.
A successful Applied Performance Engineer will have a broad range of skills and experience ranging from strong SQL skills, data warehousing, data architecture, data engineering, transaction processing, security, performance analysis, analytics, etc. He/she will have the insight to make the connection between a customer’s specific business problems and Snowflake’s solution, the customer-facing skills to communicate that connection and vision to a wide variety of technical and executive audiences, and the technical skills to be able to not only build and execute proof-of-concepts and benchmarks, but also to provide consultative assistance in areas of product direction.
The person we’re looking for shares our passion about reinventing the data platform and thrives in the dynamic environment. That means having the flexibility and willingness to jump in and get done what needs to be done to make Snowflake and our customers successful. It means keeping up to date on the ever-evolving technologies for data and analytics in order to be an authoritative resource for both Snowflake and customers. And it means working collaboratively with a broad range of people both inside and outside the company.
RESPONSIBILITIES:
Be an expert on the topics of Snowflake architecture, query processing, workload profiling, data engineering, and Snowflake tools
Be an expert in competitor solutions/products for analytics and data engineering
Define, automate, execute, and publish competitive benchmarks
Partner closely with other engineering teams to deliver both results and guidance on performance gaps, challenges, advantages, and disadvantages
Collaborate with Product Management and Engineering to continuously improve Snowflake’s products and eco-system roadmaps.
OUR IDEAL APPLIED PERFORMANCE ENGINEER WILL HAVE:
Minimum 5 years of experience in technical role delivering Database, Data Warehouse, or Data Engineering implementations and/or benchmark initiatives
Experience and ability to work directly with other engineering teams, product managers, and various levels of management
Strong communication skills, able to effectively communicate ideas and technical concepts to both technical and executive audiences
Broad understanding of cloud platforms and solutions, including experience and understanding of large-scale infrastructure-as-a-service platforms (e.g. Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack)
Proven track record of experience with Snowflake competitors
Deep understanding of complete data engineering and analytics stack and workflow, from data ingestion and load to transformation to data platform design to BI and analytics tools
Deep technical expertise in databases, data warehouses, data processing, and applications
Coding/programming experience in process automation
Strong SQL performance analysis experience, Python and/or Java expertise, and the ability to use tools to identify and articulate performance issues
STRONGLY DESIRED:
Extensive knowledge of and experience with large-scale databases and distributed data processing technology (e.g. Databricks, Spark, Netezza, Oracle, Teradata, Greenplum, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, Microsoft Synapse, Postgres, Apache Spark, Ray, Dask, Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, etc.)
Software development experience with C/C++, Java, Scala, Spark
Scripting experience with Python, Ruby, Perl, Bash
Knowledge of and experience with AI and Machine Learning technologies either in use (eg. using a coding assistant), or in development (eg. using technologies like PyTorch for training and inference).
University degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics or related fields, 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
