SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Snowflake is seeking a Principal Software Engineer 2 to define and drive the architecture of next-generation transactional systems (OLTP) across Snowflake Postgres, Unistore, and supporting cloud infrastructure. This is a high-impact technical leadership role focused on building transactional databases optimized for AI agents and modern applications.
Key responsibilities include:
- Define long-term technical architecture for OLTP systems, spanning transactions, storage, concurrency control, replication, recovery, query execution, and scalability
- Lead major architectural decisions across database internals and cloud infrastructure
- Shape compute and storage architecture for low-latency, highly available transactional systems, including resource isolation, elasticity, networking, caching, and container infrastructure
- Build database primitives for agent-driven workloads, including fast creation of isolated transactional environments, checkpointing, rollback, and efficient lifecycle management
- Define safety and governance mechanisms for agents reading and modifying operational state with strong consistency, recovery, access control, and governance guarantees
- Determine where PostgreSQL architecture provides leverage versus where alternative approaches deliver advantages
- Design for programmatic database creation and operation at machine speed rather than human administration
- Lead complex, cross-organizational engineering efforts and establish technical direction across multiple teams
- Partner with product leaders, senior engineering leadership, and strategic customers on critical technical and product decisions
- Raise the technical bar through architecture reviews, mentoring, and hands-on leadership on systems problems
Requirements:
- 15+ years of experience building databases, distributed systems, storage systems, or large-scale cloud infrastructure with sustained impact at significant technical scope
- Deep expertise in OLTP and database systems, including transactions, concurrency control, storage engines, indexing, query processing, replication, recovery, and high availability
- Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure for low-latency stateful systems (compute, storage, networking, resource isolation, failure handling)
- Experience designing highly elastic, multi-tenant, or rapidly provisioned stateful systems with isolation and efficient lifecycle management as first-class concerns
- Strong instincts for database architecture evolution for AI-native applications and autonomous agents (ephemeral state, sandboxing, safe transactional actions, programmatic lifecycle)
- Track record of making difficult architectural tradeoffs across latency, throughput, consistency, availability, durability, scalability, isolation, and cost
- Demonstrated ability to take technically ambitious systems from architecture through production at meaningful scale
- Experience influencing technical direction across multiple teams or broad product areas
- Strong systems engineering instincts and ability to work across abstractions from database internals to distributed infrastructure
- Deep PostgreSQL expertise is a strong advantage; experience with other sophisticated transactional or distributed database systems equally relevant
- Strong systems programming experience; C, C++, or Rust experience is a plus
- Exceptional technical judgment and communication skills to influence engineers, executives, and customers
