Principal Software Engineer II, Horizon Catalog

Snowflake•Menlo Park, CA

30d

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. The Snowflake Horizon Catalog is the Universal AI Catalog, providing built-in context and governance for AI across all enterprise data. It is compatible with any engine, any data format, and runs anywhere. Horizon Catalog unifies discovery, security, compliance, and collaboration, serving as the single source of truth for the entire data estate. This role is central to Snowflake's culture of impact, innovation, and collaboration. We are looking for a visionary engineering leader to drive company-wide technical strategy and execute critical, multi-year initiatives with cross-organizational impact.

Requirements

15+ years experience designing and building large-scale distributed services.
Metadata Mastery: Deep expertise in metadata management and designing architectures to unify data from heterogeneous sources for governance.
Governance Expertise: Proven ability to architect fine-grained access control and audit systems.
Strategic Leadership: Track record of translating high-level business strategy into actionable engineering roadmaps and influencing technical direction across multiple teams.
Fluency in Java or another similar procedural object-oriented language.
BS, Masters or PhD in Computer Science.

Nice To Haves

AI/Semantic Architecture: Experience leveraging semantic metadata to power AI experiences, such as RAG for discovery.
Competitive Fluency: Ability to articulate architectural differentiation against key competitors.
Modern Access Control: Solid understanding of RBAC and ABAC principles applied to scalable permissioning layers.
MCP/Agent Ecosystems: Experience exposing catalog/search tools via Multi-Cloud Platforms for third-party agents, including safety and policy integration.

Responsibilities

Set Technical Vision: Lead strategic planning for the Horizon Catalog, translating complex business goals into technical architecture, and developing high-impact engineering roadmaps.
Drive Product Influence: Actively influence and co-develop the product roadmap in partnership with the PM team
High velocity execution: Directly lead execution of high complexity initiatives, and guide the execution of other initiatives in the team
Technical Mentorship: Mentor and grow senior engineers