Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Database Engineering role sits at the infrastructure layer of a cloud data platform, where SaaS differentiation often comes from reliability, elasticity, and predictable performance at scale. Work of this kind tends to be tightly coupled to real customer workloads and platform constraints, making it a strong window into how modern SaaS products turn distributed systems into usable, governed services.
For a long-term SaaS career, the signal here is depth in systems engineering that transfers across data-intensive products: instrumentation, bottleneck analysis, fault tolerance, and query or execution optimisations. Experience designing components that operate at petabyte scale also builds a practical understanding of multi-tenant architectures, operational correctness, and the tradeoffs between cost, latency, and consistency that shape cloud services.
This position generally fits engineers who prefer digging into complex internals rather than building surface-level application features, and who enjoy methodical debugging backed by measurement. It suits professionals aiming to grow into senior individual contributor paths in platform, database, or distributed systems work, particularly in environments where performance and scalability are first-order product requirements.
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
