Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Senior Software Engineer role sits at the infrastructure core of a modern SaaS observability product, where the service itself is defined by how reliably it ingests and interprets telemetry. Observe’s positioning on top of the Snowflake AI Data Cloud signals a platform-style SaaS environment, with real multi-tenant considerations and heavy emphasis on data movement, storage formats, and cross-cloud operations rather than feature-layer application work.
For a SaaS career, the work maps directly to problems that recur across data-intensive products: high-throughput pipelines, latency and availability tradeoffs, and operating distributed systems that customers depend on continuously. Experience with open standards like OpenTelemetry and formats like Iceberg also tends to transfer well across the SaaS ecosystem, since portability and ecosystem integration increasingly shape product strategy in observability and data platforms.
The role is best suited to engineers who prefer deep systems work and measurable operational outcomes over UI-centric development. It fits someone comfortable owning reliability and performance at the service boundary, collaborating closely with SRE and product counterparts, and contributing to technical direction through mentoring and roadmap input in a platform-focused team.
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.
Observe by Snowflake is an AI-powered observability platform built on the Snowflake AI Data Cloud and engineered for scale. We ingest and store logs, metrics, traces, and events on an open, scalable data lakehouse using open formats like Apache Iceberg — at dramatically lower cost. A dynamic Context Graph and chat-based AI SRE provide rich context and automated workflows so teams can move from detection to root cause and resolution 10x faster.
Leading engineering teams at companies like Capital One, Topgolf, and Dialpad rely on Observe to troubleshoot hundreds of terabytes of telemetry daily while maintaining reliability at enterprise scale. As part of Snowflake, Observe combines startup-style ownership and velocity with the global reach, operational excellence, and ecosystem of one of the world's leading data platforms.
We are hiring a Senior Software Engineer for the Observe Data Management team. This team owns the core pipelines that ingest and process over 1 petabyte of telemetry data per day — the foundational infrastructure powering Observe's entire observability stack. You'll be working at the intersection of massive scale, open-source innovation, and real-world reliability challenges for enterprise customers around the globe.
AS A SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER - OBSERVE DATA MANAGEMENT AT SNOWFLAKE, YOU WILL:
Design, build, and scale high-throughput data ingestion and processing pipelines handling petabyte-scale telemetry — logs, metrics, traces, and events
Develop performance-critical, distributed systems components in Go and/or C++ that operate reliably across AWS and Azure
Contribute to OpenTelemetry and drive Observe's open-source strategy, including external community engagement and upstream contributions
Architect solutions that maintain enterprise-grade availability and low latency under extreme data volumes
Collaborate with SRE, product, and platform teams to define data reliability standards and improve detection-to-resolution times for customers
Debug and resolve complex distributed systems issues at the deepest layers of the stack
Help shape the technical roadmap for the Data Management team and mentor engineers across the organization
OUR IDEAL SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER - OBSERVE DATA MANAGEMENT WILL HAVE:
5+ years of software engineering experience with deep expertise in distributed systems
Proficiency in Go and/or C++, with an ability to write high-performance, production-grade systems code
Demonstrated experience designing and operating large-scale data ingestion or stream processing pipelines
A strong sense of user empathy and product intuition — you think beyond APIs and care about end-to-end data onboarding and management experience.
Hands-on experience building and running services across major cloud providers (AWS and/or Azure)
Strong fundamentals in systems programming: concurrency, memory management, networking, and I/O
A track record of solving hard infrastructure or platform engineering problems at scale
B.S. in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
BONUS POINTS FOR THE FOLLOWING:
Experience with OpenTelemetry SDKs, instrumentation, or ecosystem tooling
Prior open-source contributions or project maintainership
Familiarity with Apache Iceberg or other open table formats and data lakehouse architectures
Background in observability, monitoring, or SRE
Experience with multi-cloud data infrastructure or telemetry platforms at petabyte scale
WHY JOIN OUR OBSERVE TEAM AT SNOWFLAKE?
The Observe team is building the future of AI-powered observability — from the ground up, at a scale few engineering teams ever touch. You'll have genuine ownership over systems that ingest and make sense of a petabyte of data per day, with a direct line from your work to the reliability and speed of enterprise customers who depend on Observe every hour of every day. And as part of Snowflake, you'll do it with the backing of one of the world's leading data platforms, while still moving with the velocity and ownership culture of a focused product team.
How do you want to make your impact?
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
