Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Snowflake sits in the infrastructure layer of modern SaaS, where product differentiation often comes from reliability, latency, and trust at scale. A senior engineer focused on metadata is positioned in a part of the platform that quietly underpins governance, lineage, catalog, and interoperability, all of which matter more as SaaS products expand into AI and analytics workloads. The listing signals a remit tied to multi-tenant, cloud-native services handling massive query and metadata volumes, which is a defining challenge in data-platform SaaS.
For a long-term SaaS career, this kind of role builds durable systems expertise that transfers across platform companies. Work on distributed consistency tradeoffs, storage and retrieval patterns, and operational tooling maps directly to the concerns that emerge as SaaS products scale usage and feature surface area. The emphasis on APIs and internal frameworks also points to experience building “platform for product teams,” a common path into staff-level scope in SaaS engineering.
This role is best suited to engineers who prefer deep backend problems over UI-centric work and who enjoy turning ambiguity into production-grade systems. It fits someone comfortable leading designs across multiple engineers and collaborating with product and partner teams while keeping correctness and performance as first-order priorities.
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.
About the Role
Every time a Snowflake query runs — and we're talking billions of queries a day — something has to know exactly where every byte of customer data lives, which version is current, and how to coordinate it all in milliseconds. That's the Metadata team. We're the layer that makes Snowflake's AI Data Cloud feel instant and interoperable at exabyte scale. No one sees us. Everyone depends on us.
If you love hard distributed systems and database engine problems, care about correctness and performance, and want your work to power the world's most demanding data workloads, Agentic dataflows, and the AI applications being built on top of them.
What You'll Build
Core metadata storage and retrieval systems that power Snowflake's catalog, lineage, and governance products
High-throughput, low-latency distributed services in a cloud-native environment
APIs and frameworks consumed by internal teams and external customers
Observability, reliability, and operational tooling for production metadata services
Scalable data models that evolve with Snowflake's rapidly growing feature surface
What We Look For
Required
7+ years of experience in backend software engineering
Strong proficiency in Java, C++, Go, or similar systems-level languages
Experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale (high availability, fault tolerance, consistency tradeoffs)
Solid understanding of database internals, metadata management, or catalog systems
Proven ability to lead technical design across multiple engineers and drive features end-to-end
Strong communication skills — able to write clear design documents and present tradeoffs to stakeholders
Preferred
Experience with data catalog, data governance, or schema registry systems
Familiarity with cloud infrastructure on AWS, Azure, or GCP
Prior work on multi-tenant SaaS platforms
Contributions to open-source projects in the metadata or data infrastructure space
What You'll Bring
Ownership mindset — you take problems from ambiguity to production
Judgment on when to build vs. buy, and when to invest in platform vs. ship features
Mentorship instinct — you raise the technical bar of the engineers around you
Curiosity about the broader Snowflake ecosystem and how metadata enables every other product
Snowflake's Metadata team is at the heart of the data cloud, building the systems that power object discovery, governance, lineage, and catalog capabilities across the platform. As a Senior Software Engineer on this team, you will design and implement highly scalable, distributed backend services that serve millions of metadata operations per day. You'll work closely with product, design, and partner engineering teams to shape the future of how users understand and manage their data assets.
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
