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Snowflake is seeking an Engineering Manager for Release Validation to lead a team building test frameworks and validation platforms that enable safe, cost-efficient continuous deployment at scale. The role sits at the intersection of testing infrastructure, developer productivity, and AI-driven automation.
You will lead and grow a team of engineers working on test infrastructure, automation, and developer tooling, with responsibility for hiring, mentoring, and developing engineers at different career stages. You'll set the multi-quarter strategy and roadmap for release validation, focusing on faster signals, fewer blockers, better test quality, and lower costs.
Key responsibilities include owning the validation platform's reliability, scalability, and efficiency across distributed regression and workload test frameworks, pre-production environments, and the release validation pipeline. You'll work to improve test health across the company by partnering with feature teams to reduce flaky, non-hermetic, duplicate, and low-value tests, while setting standards and incentives to maintain health. You'll lead efforts to cut down release blockers by improving failure tracing, filtering infrastructure noise, and accelerating triage so real regressions reach owning teams quickly.
The role emphasizes driving AI and automation initiatives—investing in AI-driven failure analysis and automated routing to remove manual work—and acting as the main partner to Release Engineering and engineering leaders on release quality. You'll work across teams, influence without authority, and communicate complex technical tradeoffs to both engineers and executives.
Snowflake's Release Validation Team treats validation as a scalable, developer-first platform serving Snowflake engineers and their autonomous AI agents. The mission is to give Snowflake confidence to ship at speed without compromising reliability.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 3–5 years of experience hiring, coaching, and developing engineers at different career stages
- Experience building and running large-scale CI/CD, test infrastructure, or developer productivity platforms, ideally for complex distributed systems
- Strong technical background with depth to review designs, make architecture tradeoffs, and earn respect of senior engineers
- Solid grasp of test strategy: regression vs. workload testing, hermeticity, flakiness, coverage tradeoffs, and release gating
- Experience driving work across many teams and influencing without authority
- Data-driven leadership style with ability to set measurable goals and use metrics to prioritize and show impact
- Strong communication skills, including explaining complex technical tradeoffs to engineers and executives
- BS/MS in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience
