Principal Software Engineer II - Interoperable Foundations

Snowflake's rise as a revolutionary cloud data warehouse was fueled by a key architectural tenet: separating compute from storage through a world-class metadata engine. Now, as we transition to the “Interoperable Data + AI Cloud”, metadata and open standards are the keys to unlocking the agentic enterprise at scale.

AI agents cannot reason over raw data; they require deep context, strict governance, and instant interoperability. To usher in this new era, we are seeking AI-native systems thinkers to architect the foundational substrate that allows autonomous AI to query, understand, and act upon exabyte-scale datasets regardless of whether that data is stored directly within Snowflake or resides externally in a customer managed lakehouse.

The Mission: Interoperability and Metadata as the Engine for AI

As part of the Snowflake Interoperable Foundations organization, you will lead a 0->1 ground-up redesign of our core metadata and storage architecture.

Metadata engineering and open standards (like Apache Iceberg) are the linchpins of Snowflake's future. They are what allow us to bring Snowflake's industry-leading performance and governance to data sitting anywhere in the world. Your mission is to evolve this architecture so that open, multi-format data lakes are not just searchable by humans, but inherently AI-ready by transforming interoperable metadata into the contextual engine that powers agentic innovation.

Your Impact: Architecting the Data + AI Cloud

• 0->1 Metadata Redesign: Lead the ground-up re-architecture of our core metadata systems. You will build the highly concurrent transaction frameworks that power query, DML, and AI-driven data interactions, ensuring our metadata layer scales to support the massive contextual demands of agentic AI.
• Championing the Open Standard (Apache Iceberg): Drive industry-defining innovations on Apache Iceberg. You will ensure open table formats are no longer just storage abstractions, but first-class citizens that deliver native-level performance and governance for analytics, data engineering, and AI workloads without vendor lock-in.
• Building the Agentic Foundation: AI needs context to act safely and accurately. You will build the rich metadata structures that provide AI agents with the semantic understanding and governance required to navigate and manipulate massive global datasets.
• Scale & Systems Resilience: Solve non-negotiable challenges in fault tolerance, high availability, and extreme performance for a global ecosystem that treats multi-cloud resiliency as a baseline requirement.
• Strategic Influence: Own the end-to-end platform architecture, set and shape the future roadmap for how metadata interfaces with AI, and mentor the next generation of engineers in a low-ego, high-impact environment.

What You Bring:

• 15+ Years Systems Experience: A proven track record of designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems and solving difficult multi-cloud interoperability challenges.
• Database Internals Builder: Deep expertise in “building” database, metadata management, query optimization, data catalog, compaction, or large-scale state management systems.
• 0->1 Technical Leadership: A history of implementing greenfield, cloud-scale solutions and migrating massive, high-throughput distributed systems to next-generation architectures.
• Core Systems Fundamentals: Strong grasp of storage performance, distributed consistency trade-offs, and algorithms.

Every Snowflake employee is expected to follow the company’s confidentiality and security standards for handling sensitive data. Snowflake employees must abide by the company’s data security plan as an essential part of their duties. It is every employee's duty to keep customer information secure and confidential.

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