Principal Engineer - Metadata

Snowflake • Menlo Park, CA

85d

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. We are the Snowflake Metadata team. We own Snowflake’s metadata systems that make it easy for customers to query, modify and manage their petabyte-scale data. We develop distributed systems that store and maintain metadata, transaction frameworks that power Snowflake’s query and DML capabilities, asynchronous systems that provide time travel and lifecycle management capabilities and entity metadata supporting DDL capabilities. We also build foundational capabilities that deliver global features like cross-region replication (Snowgrid), data sharing, and data marketplace. Our mission is to build the next generation Metadata Platform that will significantly unlock new capabilities for Snowflake across Iceberg, unstructured data and extending Snowflake’s enterprise capabilities. Your work will drive industry leading innovation on Iceberg, Analytics, Data Engineering and AI.

Requirements

• 15+ years of industry experience designing, building and supporting large scale distributed services.
• Deep and broad expertise in a variety of database systems internals including metadata management, clustering, compaction, catalogs, storage and replication.
• Strong computer science fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems.
• Excellent understanding of systems infrastructure product development and concepts including multi-threading, memory management, networking and storage, performance, reliability and scalability.
• Fluency in Java or other similar procedural object-oriented language is preferred.
• Track record of identifying and implementing creative solutions to complex problems at the cloud scale.
• Ability to work effectively across engineering teams in multiple locations.
• BS in Computer Science; Advanced degree preferred.

Responsibilities

• Solve real business needs at large scale by applying your software engineering and analytical problem solving skills.
• Design, develop and support fault-tolerant scalable distributed systems for Metadata.
• Create and own architecture and design, influence our product roadmap, and identify new projects that will ensure Snowflake creates the best technology for our customers.
• Analyze fault-tolerance and high availability issues, performance and scale challenges, and solve them.
• Mentor and grow junior engineers.
• Understand trade-offs between consistency, performance and costs to build solutions which can meet the demands of rapidly growing services.
• Ensure operational readiness of the services and meet the commitments to our customers regarding durability, availability and performance.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Bachelor's degree
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees