Engineering Manager - Openflow

Snowflake•Menlo Park, CA

20d

About The Position

Snowflake is about empowering enterprises to achieve their full potential — and people too. With a culture that’s all in on impact, innovation, and collaboration, Snowflake is the sweet spot for building big, moving fast, and taking technology — and careers — to the next level. AS AN ENGINEERING MANAGER ON THE SNOWFLAKE OPENFLOW TEAM, YOU WILL: Lead and grow a high-performing team of engineers building Openflow’s control plane, data plane, and connectors—the core of Snowflake’s open, extensible, and secure data integration platform for real-time, bi-directional data movement. Translate product strategy into an executable engineering roadmap for your area, partnering closely with PM, TPM, and other stakeholders to plan, sequence, and deliver impactful features and reliability improvements. Organize and run the team for fast, high-quality delivery, ensuring engineers are working on the right problems, managing scope and trade-offs, and keeping quality, reliability, and operability standards high. Own your area in production: stay on top of reliability, performance, and support for your services and connectors, lead responses to incidents and escalations, and drive postmortems and follow-up work that continuously improves our platform. Manage technical debt and support burden intentionally, maintaining a clear view of code health, test coverage, regression patterns, and support costs—and balancing these against new feature work. Mentor and develop engineers across IC1–IC4 levels, giving clear, actionable feedback; helping them set growth plans; and providing the right mix of autonomy and support so they can succeed and advance. Have the hard conversations when needed, addressing underperformance, misalignment with Snowflake values, and behavior that undermines team health—with empathy, clarity, and follow-through. Hire and retain exceptional talent, effectively representing Snowflake and Openflow to candidates, closing strong engineers (including those with competing offers), and building a diverse, inclusive team. Model Snowflake’s values and strong engineering leadership, creating a culture where people feel safe to speak up, collaborate across functions and time zones, and focus on what’s best for customers and for Snowflake as a whole. Contribute hands-on when appropriate, using solid coding and design skills at the IC1–IC4 level to review designs and code, unblock the team on complex technical issues, and maintain deep enough context to make sound technical decisions.

Requirements

Proven experience managing a team > 10 engineers delivering backend, platform, or data infrastructure, ideally in a high-scale, cloud-native environment.
Strong technical background in distributed systems or data platforms, with prior hands-on experience designing, building, and operating services involving reliability, performance, and scalability trade-offs.
Demonstrated ability to grow organizational capacity:
Mentoring engineers across junior and senior levels, supporting both day-to-day execution and long-term career development.
Proactively spotting areas where people need help and addressing them early through coaching, support, or structural changes.
Keeping team health and morale high, especially through ambiguity and change.
Track record of effective product development and execution:
Translating product requirements into clear technical plans and milestones.
Partnering closely with PM/TPM/Security on quarterly planning, tracking, and feedback loops.
Raising risks early—schedules, reliability, scope, or design—and course-correcting with stakeholders.
Deep sense of ownership for an area of the product, including:
Understanding and managing technical debt, test gaps, and regression patterns.
Knowing the support profile of your features (incidents, Sev1s, escalations) and driving it down over time.
Working toward clear success metrics for reliability, performance, and adoption—and pushing to improve them.
Leadership behaviors aligned with Snowflake’s values:
Putting customers and team success first; operating with integrity, openness, and respect.
Being accessible, approachable, and emotionally intelligent, creating an inclusive environment where different perspectives are valued.
Stepping up in crises—customer escalations, production incidents, security issues—to lead investigation, mitigation, communication, and long-term fixes.
Excellent communication and collaboration skills, comfortable working across multiple teams and time zones, and able to explain complex technical and trade-off decisions to diverse audiences.
Experience hiring and closing strong engineering talent, including selling the opportunity and inspiring candidates to join.
BS in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience as a senior IC and/or manager in high-scale engineering teams; prior experience as a Staff/Principal-level engineer is a strong plus.

Nice To Haves

Experience in data integration, streaming, or workflow systems (e.g., Apache NiFi, Kafka, Flink, Airflow) or data/analytics platforms, and familiarity with Snowflake or similar cloud data platforms.

Responsibilities

Lead and grow a high-performing team of engineers building Openflow’s control plane, data plane, and connectors—the core of Snowflake’s open, extensible, and secure data integration platform for real-time, bi-directional data movement.
Translate product strategy into an executable engineering roadmap for your area, partnering closely with PM, TPM, and other stakeholders to plan, sequence, and deliver impactful features and reliability improvements.
Organize and run the team for fast, high-quality delivery, ensuring engineers are working on the right problems, managing scope and trade-offs, and keeping quality, reliability, and operability standards high.
Own your area in production: stay on top of reliability, performance, and support for your services and connectors, lead responses to incidents and escalations, and drive postmortems and follow-up work that continuously improves our platform.
Manage technical debt and support burden intentionally, maintaining a clear view of code health, test coverage, regression patterns, and support costs—and balancing these against new feature work.
Mentor and develop engineers across IC1–IC4 levels, giving clear, actionable feedback; helping them set growth plans; and providing the right mix of autonomy and support so they can succeed and advance.
Have the hard conversations when needed, addressing underperformance, misalignment with Snowflake values, and behavior that undermines team health—with empathy, clarity, and follow-through.
Hire and retain exceptional talent, effectively representing Snowflake and Openflow to candidates, closing strong engineers (including those with competing offers), and building a diverse, inclusive team.
Model Snowflake’s values and strong engineering leadership, creating a culture where people feel safe to speak up, collaborate across functions and time zones, and focus on what’s best for customers and for Snowflake as a whole.
Contribute hands-on when appropriate, using solid coding and design skills at the IC1–IC4 level to review designs and code, unblock the team on complex technical issues, and maintain deep enough context to make sound technical decisions.