Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Principal Software Engineer role sits in a core layer of modern SaaS data platforms: the catalog and governance surface that makes enterprise data usable, auditable, and increasingly AI-ready. Work on a “universal” catalog is inherently ecosystem-facing, requiring designs that tolerate heterogeneous engines, formats, and deployment environments. In the current SaaS landscape, where AI features depend on trustworthy context and permissions, catalog architecture has become a strategic product primitive rather than a back-office system.
From a SaaS career standpoint, the position offers durable exposure to problems that recur across scaled cloud products: multi-tenant metadata, authorization models, auditability, and cross-service contracts that must remain stable as capabilities expand. The emphasis on influencing roadmaps and leading multi-year initiatives also maps to how senior engineering impact is measured in mature SaaS orgs, where technical decisions shape platform leverage across many teams and customer workflows.
This role tends to fit engineers who prefer platform thinking over feature delivery, and who enjoy translating ambiguous governance requirements into clear architectures. It also suits leaders comfortable mentoring senior peers and navigating cross-organizational alignment, especially where security and compliance constraints are first-order design inputs.
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 Snowflake Horizon Catalog is the Universal AI Catalog, providing built-in context and governance for AI across all enterprise data. It is compatible with any engine, any data format, and runs anywhere. Horizon Catalog unifies discovery, security, compliance, and collaboration, serving as the single source of truth for the entire data estate.
This role is central to Snowflake's culture of impact, innovation, and collaboration. We are looking for a visionary engineering leader to drive company-wide technical strategy and execute critical, multi-year initiatives with cross-organizational impact.
AS A PRINCIPAL SOFTWARE ENGINEER II, YOU WILL:
Set Technical Vision: Lead strategic planning for the Horizon Catalog, translating complex business goals into technical architecture, and developing high-impact engineering roadmaps.
Drive Product Influence: Actively influence and co-develop the product roadmap in partnership with the PM team
High velocity execution: Directly lead execution of high complexity initiatives, and guide the execution of other initiatives in the team
Technical Mentorship: Mentor and grow senior engineers
OUR IDEAL PRINCIPAL SOFTWARE ENGINEER II WILL HAVE:
Minimum Qualifications
15+ years experience designing and building large-scale distributed services.
Metadata Mastery: Deep expertise in metadata management and designing architectures to unify data from heterogeneous sources for governance.
Governance Expertise: Proven ability to architect fine-grained access control and audit systems.
Strategic Leadership: Track record of translating high-level business strategy into actionable engineering roadmaps and influencing technical direction across multiple teams.
Fluency in Java or another similar procedural object-oriented language.
BS, Masters or PhD in Computer Science.
Preferred Qualifications (Strategic Differentiation)
AI/Semantic Architecture: Experience leveraging semantic metadata to power AI experiences, such as RAG for discovery.
Competitive Fluency: Ability to articulate architectural differentiation against key competitors.
Modern Access Control: Solid understanding of RBAC and ABAC principles applied to scalable permissioning layers.
MCP/Agent Ecosystems: Experience exposing catalog/search tools via Multi-Cloud Platforms for third-party agents, including safety and policy integration.
WHY JOIN THE ENGINEERING TEAM AT SNOWFLAKE?
Build an industry-leading Cloud Data and AI Platform, solving challenging technical problems related to security, parallelism, distributed systems, and large-scale system maintenance. Join a world-class team and innovate with rigor.
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
