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Snowflake's File Ingestion team owns the core engines behind COPY INTO and Snowpipe, which handle hundreds of petabytes of customer data landing into the AI Data Cloud quarterly. The company is expanding its mission to build next-generation, external-facing ingestion services that expose file-ingest capabilities directly to external platforms, partner ecosystems, and customer applications.
As a Staff Software Engineer, you will lead the architectural vision and execution for these mission-critical, customer-facing services. You will operate at the intersection of high-throughput distributed systems, API platform design, and direct customer feature delivery, defining how enterprise data seamlessly flows into Snowflake at global scale.
Key responsibilities include:
- Driving technical vision and architecture for high-throughput, external-facing ingestion services and APIs across multi-cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP)
- Leading end-to-end execution of enterprise-grade external features, ensuring low-latency data landing, high availability, and seamless ecosystem integration (e.g., Snowpark Connect, partner connectors)
- Authoring foundational design documents, establishing technical standards for reliability, security, and scalability, and leading high-stakes architectural reviews across engineering organizations
- Partnering with Principal Architects, Product Management, Security, and external developer platforms to translate customer requirements into resilient system architecture
- Mentoring and sponsoring Senior, Mid-level, and Junior engineers; raising the bar for system design, code quality, testing methodologies, and operational maturity
- Engaging with enterprise customer engineering teams to solve complex integration challenges, debug production edge cases at scale, and turn direct customer feedback into core platform capabilities
You will have massive strategic impact, leading the expansion of Snowflake's most critical data-path surface into direct, customer-facing integrations that unlock new platform ecosystems and drive platform volume. Your work will bridge edge API layers, control-plane orchestrators, file scanners/parsers, query planners, and underlying storage engines. You will work directly on features that power external integrations for Fortune 500 enterprises, seeing immediate revenue and performance impact of your architecture.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 10+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems or cloud-native infrastructure in production
- Proven track record of architectural leadership, having successfully taken complex, customer-facing services or external APIs from initial concept to General Availability (GA) and global scale
- Expert proficiency in Java or C++ (strong preference for engineers comfortable working across both systems-level C++ and managed service Java frameworks)
- Deep expertise in external API design, cloud service orchestration, and building resilient, multi-tenant customer-facing endpoints
- Deep domain knowledge in at least one of the following: high-throughput ingestion pipelines, distributed query execution engines, messaging/streaming systems (e.g., Kafka, Pulsar), or database internals
- Exceptional written and verbal communication skills with demonstrated ability to drive technical consensus across cross-functional leadership, product partners, and external technical stakeholders
- BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
BONUS:
- Experience building and scaling external developer platforms, SDKs, or public SaaS APIs serving external consumers
- Deep expertise with open table formats (Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake) and integration with ecosystems like Apache Spark or Ray
- Advanced performance engineering expertise: memory management, SIMD, vectorization, lock-free data structures, or I/O optimization at PB-scale
- Strong background in metadata management, transactional state machines, or consensus protocols (e.g., Raft, Paxos)
- Active contributor to open-source data infrastructure, cloud-native compute systems, or query engines
