Senior Software Engineer - APM & AI Observability

Snowflake • Menlo Park, CA

2d

About The Position

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.
Observe by Snowflake is an AI-powered observability platform engineered for scale — ingesting logs, metrics, traces, and events on an open data lakehouse using Apache Iceberg, at dramatically lower cost than traditional tools. Our products help engineering teams at companies like Capital One, Topgolf, and Dialpad move from detection to root cause 10x faster across hundreds of terabytes of telemetry data daily. As part of Snowflake, we combine startup-style ownership and velocity with the reach and ecosystem of one of the world's leading data platforms. We are hiring a Senior Software Engineer to own and drive the evolution of our APM and AI observability products — two adjacent product lines that sit at the intersection of AI, advanced streaming data pipelines, and backend platform engineering.

Requirements

• BS in Computer Science or equivalent and solid computer science fundamentals (algorithms, systems, distributed computing)
• 5+ years of backend development experience with strong programming and debugging skills
• Experience working with complex data pipelines and/or data warehouses at production scale
• Demonstrated product mindset — you seek to understand user motivation and use cases before diving into implementation
• Experience owning and driving medium-sized projects successfully, including architecture and cross-team delivery
• Strong communication and collaboration skills — you're effective working with engineering, product, design, and customer-facing teammates
• Experience mentoring junior engineers or leading technical design discussions

Nice To Haves

• Experience building or working on APM or AI observability products (OpenTelemetry experience a strong plus)
• Hands-on experience building or operating agentic applications in production
• Exposure to customer-facing product development with strong product intuition
• Experience with streaming systems, distributed tracing, or graph-based data pipelines
• Prior experience in high-growth startups or fast-paced product environments where you shipped fast and owned outcomes

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end product scopes across our APM and AI observability product lines — from backend behavior and API design to data pipeline architecture and client-side SDK work
• Build and optimize streaming data pipelines that tackle graph traversal challenges at scale and LLM-as-judge online evaluation pipelines for real-time agentic telemetry
• Design and implement backend services and APIs that power microservice topology views, service error detection, latency analysis, and agentic workflow monitoring
• Collaborate cross-functionally with frontend, design, product, and support teams to deliver products that are intuitive for both human users and AI-native workflows (agentic users like Claude Code and Cursor are first-class citizens on our platform)
• Drive architecture and delivery for medium-to-large projects end-to-end, from technical design through production launch
• Champion product thinking on the engineering team — deeply understand customer use cases in both microservice and agentic application contexts before diving into technical solutions
• Mentor junior engineers and lead technical design decisions that raise the quality bar across the team

Benefits

• Observe by Snowflake is where observability gets reinvented — not incrementally, but fundamentally.
• We're the only observability platform built natively on the Snowflake AI Data Cloud, which means we skip the compromises: no more choosing between cost and retention, no more fragmented tools for logs vs. traces vs. metrics.
• Engineering teams at some of the most demanding companies in the world rely on us to debug at scale, and we're just getting started.
• What makes this role unique is the intersection of problems you'll work on: streaming graph traversal at scale, agentic AI monitoring, and a product philosophy that treats AI-native workflows as first-class citizens.
• You'll have a real product scope to own, a team with startup velocity, and the full weight of Snowflake's platform, data, and go-to-market behind you.
• Snowflake is growing fast, and we’re scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth.
• We are looking for people who share our values, challenge ordinary thinking, and push the pace of innovation while building a future for themselves and Snowflake.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior