Principal Software Engineer II, Data Platform (Streaming, Dynamic Tables and more)

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.

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.