Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Senior Software Engineer role sits at a core layer of the SaaS stack: the database engine. Snowflake is positioning Postgres as a first class service within a multi cloud data platform, which makes the work materially different from typical application engineering. Building extensions, optimization paths, and operational primitives for managed Postgres ties directly to how modern SaaS products deliver reliability, performance, and predictable cost at scale.
For a SaaS career, the role offers durable leverage by deepening expertise in systems that sit behind nearly every subscription product: query execution, transactions, resource management, and observability. Experience shipping engine level changes with safe rollout practices translates well across infrastructure and platform teams in SaaS, particularly where product differentiation depends on performance and workload isolation rather than feature surface area alone. The open source component also creates a public track record that can carry across the ecosystem.
This is best suited to an engineer who prefers low level problem solving, rigorous measurement, and long horizon technical ownership. It fits someone comfortable collaborating across product groups and time zones, and motivated by work that blends research minded exploration with production accountability in a managed service context.
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.
Snowflake started with a clear vision: make modern data warehousing effective, affordable, and accessible to all data users. Because traditional on-premise and cloud solutions struggle with this, Snowflake developed an innovative product with a new, built-for-the-cloud architecture that combines the power of data warehousing, the flexibility of big data platforms, and the elasticity of the cloud at a fraction of the cost of traditional OLAP solutions. To complement this world class OLAP service, Snowflake is now building a world class OLTP service on Postgres - one that uniquely bridges OLTP with Snowflake’s data platform and AI capabilities, while significantly contributing to open source.
Join us as a Postgres Engine and Extensions Engineer and contribute to the development of Snowflake's new Postgres service. This is a unique opportunity to innovate and build differentiating technology for a large, multi-cloud Postgres offering, bringing cutting edge Postgres capabilities to millions of Snowflake users. Our team includes some of the most experienced Postgres extension engineers worldwide. Much of your work will be open source and visible to the Postgres as well as Apache Iceberg communities.
As a Postgres Engineer you will
Explore new database technologies and innovate to bring new capabilities to Postgres
Design and develop Postgres extensions to bring differentiating features to Snowflake
Identify and implement novel query optimization, transaction management, and data movement algorithms to deliver industry-leading performance
Deal with a broad set of (distributed) systems challenges from protocol design and fault-tolerance to resource management and parallel execution
Analyze and understand performance and scalability bottlenecks and solve them
Pinpoint problems, build instrumentation (as needed), and deliver solutions
Own the end to end delivery of projects from identifying a solution, to designing, implementation, testing, and safe production rollout
Contribute to architectural design, review other engineers’ work and mentor
Communicate and collaborate with different product groups across different time zones
Our ideal engineer will have
Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or Engineering (or equivalent learning experience)
7+ years of software engineering experience in high performance mission critical software
Experience with Postgres internals and its extension framework
Strong CS and database fundamentals, including proficiency with data structures and algorithms, SQL, distributed systems (Fluency in C preferred)
Motivation to push outside of comfort zone, learn and deliver innovative solutions
Track record of working in high velocity engineering teams and delivering products to market
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
