Staff Software Engineer - Core Data and Transactions Infrastructure (Metadata)

Staff Software Engineer - Core Data and Transactions Infrastructure (Metadata) 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. Imagine you are part of a team of talented software engineers to shape the future of Snowflake’s Data Cloud. We’re looking for talented and driven software engineers that are passionate about pushing the boundaries of speed and scale. We keep a high bar in engineering as we want to release new versions of Snowflake at fast cadence to all our customers across the globe. If this resonates with you, read on and apply! Our mission is to provide low-latency and highly consistent access to Snowflake’s metadata in a secure way. We keep data safe through geo replication and offer immutable snapshots over long periods of time. Most prominently, we build high-scale APIs that power different types of workload from analytics warehouse and Unistore up to AI and container functions. Almost any internal service interfaces with Metadata APIs. Therefore, our services run at a large scale, supporting trillions of requests per day. Additionally, we own the representation of Metadata to users through the means of Infoschema, SHOW commands and Snowflake APIs. Link to article about Metadata team https://careers.snowflake.com/us/en/blogarticle/the-metadata-team-in-berlin-takes-the-lead AS A STAFF SOFTWARE ENGINEER - METADATA, YOU WILL: - Solve real business needs at large scale by applying your software engineering and analytical problem solving skills. - Build the next-generation transaction system, storage engine and multi-tenant database system. - Design, develop, and support a highly-parallel and fault-tolerant database system including a decentralized caching system of terabytes of metadata. - Design and implement critical high-performance systems to handle the ever growing request rate of our database. - Design and implement core infrastructure features including APIs, DDL transactions and logs as well as advanced features built on top of the metadata, such as cloning, time travel, snapshots and replication. - Analyze and understand performance and scalability bottlenecks in the system and solve them. - Have the opportunity to work on various background services that power Snowflake's proprietary multi-level metadata system to support fast compilation and query optimization. - Ensure operational readiness of the services and meet the commitments to our customers regarding availability and performance. We are looking for strong system engineers who are interested in solving some of the most challenging problems in distributed systems, performance and scalability, and passionate about building system software with high quality. OUR IDEAL STAFF SOFTWARE ENGINEER WILL HAVE: - 10+ years industry experience designing, building and supporting large scale systems in production. - Strong computer science fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems. - Systems programming skills including multi-threading, concurrency, caching, etc. Fluency in Java (or other similar procedural object-oriented language) is preferred. - Track record of identifying and implementing creative solutions. - Knowledge of database internals is a big plus. - BS in Computer Science; Masters or PhD Preferred. Snowflake is growing fast, and we’re scaling our te ... (truncated, view full listing at source)