Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Principal Software Engineer role sits at a mature SaaS platform where customer experience is shaped as much by internal tooling and data as by product features. The remit spans services, data pipelines, and applications used by support and field teams, which is a common pattern in scaled SaaS businesses that treat operational insight and issue detection as core product capabilities. The explicit focus on AI technologies and agent-style workflows also reflects how enterprise SaaS teams are modernising support and diagnostics.
For a long-term SaaS engineering trajectory, the work builds durable leverage: designing architectures that must balance reliability, latency, and cost while serving multiple internal stakeholders. Ownership across observability, SLOs, incident response, and data quality aligns closely with how SaaS companies measure and run production systems. Leading multi-quarter initiatives and making cross-team design trade-offs are experiences that transfer directly into staff and principal-level roles across the ecosystem.
This is best suited to an engineer who prefers broad, end-to-end problem spaces rather than narrow feature delivery, and who is comfortable influencing direction across teams and time zones. It fits someone who enjoys mentoring and setting engineering standards, while staying close to production realities and customer-impacting workflows.
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
At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise. To usher in this new era, we seek AI-native thinkers across every function who are energized by the opportunity to reinvent how they work. You don’t just use tools; you possess an innate curiosity, treating AI as a high-trust collaborator that is core to how you solve problems and accelerate your impact. We look for low-ego individuals who thrive in dynamic and fast-moving environments and move with an experimental mindset — who rapidly test emerging capabilities to discover simpler, more powerful ways to deliver results. At Snowflake, your role isn't just to execute a function, but to help redefine the future of how work gets done.
At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise. To usher in this new era, we seek AI-native thinkers across every function who are energized by the opportunity to reinvent how they work. You don’t just use tools; you possess an innate curiosity, treating AI as a high-trust collaborator that is core to how you solve problems and accelerate your impact. We look for low-ego individuals who thrive in dynamic and fast-moving environments and move with an experimental mindset — who rapidly test emerging capabilities to discover simpler, more powerful ways to deliver results. At Snowflake, your role isn't just to execute a function, but to help redefine the future of how work gets done.
As a Principal Software Engineer on Customer Experience Engineering (CXE), you will be a key technical leader shaping the architecture, reliability, and evolution of the platforms and applications that our support engineers, field teams, and customers rely on every day. You will work across services, data pipelines, and applications to make it dramatically easier to understand customer environments, detect issues early, and drive high-quality, data-informed customer interactions.
What you will do
Set technical direction and architecture
Define and evolve the architecture for CXE’s core services, data pipelines, and applications, balancing robustness, scalability, cost, and developer productivity.
Drive key design decisions for systems that ingest, model, and serve large volumes of structured and unstructured diagnostic and support data.
Own and deliver high-impact initiatives
Lead multi-quarter, cross-team initiatives from problem definition through design, implementation, rollout, and ongoing operation.
Take end-to-end ownership of critical paths in our customer experience stack, ensuring we meet or exceed availability, latency, and data-quality expectations.
Raise the bar for engineering excellence
Champion best practices in design, testing, observability, performance, and incident response for CXE-owned systems.
Proactively identify and address technical debt, complexity hot spots, and operational risks across services and pipelines.
Collaborate across functions and geographies
Partner closely with Product Management, TPMs, Support, and other Engineering teams to clarify requirements, validate trade-offs, and land pragmatic solutions.
Effectively coordinate work across teams and time zones, aligning stakeholders on priorities, designs, and success metrics.
Lead through influence and mentorship
Provide technical leadership and mentorship for senior and mid-level engineers; grow others by sharing context, frameworks, and feedback.
Play a key role in recruiting and developing talent, including interviewing, onboarding, and supporting a strong engineering culture in Bangalore and globally.
Support critical customer and business needs
Use your deep system understanding to help troubleshoot complex production issues, guide incident response, and ensure we learn and improve from every incident.
Help define and refine SLOs, operational dashboards, and runbooks for the systems you own.
Our ideal Principal Software Engineer will have
B.E./B.Tech or M.E./M.Tech in Computer Science (or related field), or equivalent practical experience.
10+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, including significant ownership of large-scale systems or platforms.
Deep understanding of modern application and data architecture (services, data pipelines, APIs, streaming/batch, performance, and scale).
Strong expertise in at least one of: Java or Scala, with working knowledge of Python or other languages as a plus.
Experience with AI technologies (e.g., LLMs, vector search, embeddings) and with building or integrating AI agents/assistants into production workflows.
Experience with cloud-native infrastructure (containers, Kubernetes, serverless, CI/CD) and observability (metrics, tracing, logging).
Demonstrated technical leadership as an architect or tech lead on complex, cross-functional projects with meaningful business impact.
Strong communication skills, both written and verbal, with the ability to articulate complex ideas clearly to technical and non-technical audiences across time zones.
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
