Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Principal Software Engineer II role sits at the heart of a modern SaaS data platform, where streaming ingestion and incremental transformation are foundational capabilities rather than supporting features. Work on dynamic tables and real time data movement reflects the direction many SaaS products are taking as they standardise on always current analytics, event driven architectures, and low latency customer experiences. The scope also signals a mature platform environment, where architectural decisions must hold up under broad internal adoption and cloud scale constraints.
For a long term SaaS engineering career, this kind of platform leadership is unusually portable. It builds depth in distributed systems tradeoffs, reliability and latency management, and the mechanics of turning product requirements into durable primitives that other teams depend on. The emphasis on design reviews, standards, and cross functional roadmap partnership also develops the organisational influence expected of senior technical leaders in SaaS companies.
This role is best suited to engineers who prefer being a technical anchor, balancing hands on delivery with setting direction for others. It will fit someone motivated by hard system bottlenecks, clear written communication, and mentoring senior peers, especially where customer informed platform work shapes what the broader product can deliver.
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.
As a Principal Engineer on the Data Platform team, you will be a technical anchor — setting direction, solving the hardest engineering problems, and elevating the entire team. You will work at the intersection of systems design, long-term architecture, and real-world engineering execution. In this specific role, you will lead the evolution of our declarative data pipelines, focusing on streaming ingestion and transformations.
What You'll Do
Drive the technical strategy and architecture for key Data Platform initiatives, focusing heavily on real-time data movement and incremental processing.
Lead design reviews and set engineering standards across teams.
Identify and resolve high-impact technical challenges and systemic bottlenecks to reduce latency and improve the efficiency of dynamic tables at cloud scale.
Mentor and grow senior engineers; raise the engineering bar.
Partner closely with product and infrastructure leadership on roadmap and direction.
Continuous hands-on technical deliverables in the most critical areas.
What We're Looking For
14+ years of software engineering experience with deep expertise in distributed systems.
Demonstrated track record of defining and delivering platform-scale technical initiatives.
Expert-level knowledge of streaming and/or batch data systems (Flink, Spark, or equivalent), with specialized knowledge in incremental materialization algorithms.
Strong systems thinking — ability to reason across layers of complexity (infra, storage, compute, API).
A passion for engaging directly with customers to gain insight and inspiration
Experience influencing technical direction across organizations
Excellent written and verbal communication for technical and executive audiences.
Desirable
Experience with AI-augmented development practices and integrating LLM-based tooling into engineering workflows.
Familiarity with Snowflake platform internals or cloud-native data systems.
Experience with metadata systems, query optimization, or data catalog infrastructure.
Contributions to open source, such as top-level Apache projects
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
