Senior Software Engineer - Openflow

Snowflake•Menlo Park, CA

19d

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 Openflow team is building Snowflake’s next-generation open, extensible, and secure data integration platform for real-time, scalable, bi-directional data movement, powered by Apache NiFi. We enable customers to move structured and multi-modal unstructured data across any source and any sink—Snowflake and non-Snowflake alike—through a single, cloud-native platform that supports batch and streaming, and flexible runtimes spanning Snowflake-managed (SPCS) and Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) data planes. Our team includes original creators and core contributors to Apache NiFi and industry leaders in data integration, now focused on bringing NiFi’s proven strengths—visual flows, rich connectors, and powerful routing—to Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud at enterprise scale. We work end to end across high-performance runtimes, and curated connectors, partnering closely with product, field, and open-source communities to help customers continuously ingest data, power AI and analytics workloads, and make smarter decisions in real time.

Requirements

7+ years of industry experience building and operating backend or platform services, including significant hands-on work with distributed systems.
Strong computer science fundamentals, including algorithms, data structures, and systems design, with the ability to apply them pragmatically in production code.
Practical experience with distributed systems concepts, such as concurrency, replication, partitioning, streaming, and fault tolerance, and how they impact correctness, performance, and operability.
Solid understanding of operating systems and networking basics, including multi-threading, memory management, storage, and debugging performance/scale issues.
Proficiency in Java or a similar object-oriented language (e.g., Scala, Go, C++), and experience working in large, shared codebases.
Experience building cloud-native services on at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP), using containers, CI/CD, and modern monitoring/logging stacks.
A track record of delivering high-quality, maintainable solutions to non-trivial engineering problems, balancing speed with long-term reliability and simplicity.
Strong collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to work effectively with teammates across locations, give and receive feedback, and explain technical trade-offs clearly.
BS in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience building and shipping distributed systems.

Nice To Haves

Experience with data integration, observability, or streaming/flow technologies (e.g., Apache NiFi, Kafka, Flink, Airflow, or similar) or with analytics/data platforms.

Responsibilities

Design and implement features in Openflow’s control plane and data plane, contributing to reliable, scalable, and secure services that power real-time, bi-directional data movement for our customers.
Build and evolve distributed systems for batch and streaming workloads, enabling high-throughput, low-latency data pipelines across Snowflake and non-Snowflake environments, for both structured and multi-modal unstructured data.
Own medium-sized projects end to end—from requirements clarification and technical design through implementation, testing, rollout, and follow-up improvements—with appropriate guidance from Staff and Principal engineers.
Take operational ownership of the components you build, including monitoring, on-call participation, incident response, and contributing to post-incident reviews and reliability improvements.
Apply and promote solid engineering practices in your area—clean code, robust testing, observability, security, and documentation—to keep our platform easy to operate and evolve.
Collaborate closely with peers across engineering, product, and design, translating ambiguous requirements into clear technical plans, breaking work into milestones, and communicating progress and risks.
Analyze and improve performance, scalability, and reliability of existing services and pipelines, using metrics, profiling, and experimentation to guide optimizations.
Mentor junior engineers and interns, providing constructive code reviews, design feedback, and sharing domain knowledge in Openflow, Snowflake, and distributed systems.
Contribute to shared platform tooling and patterns, helping make it easier for Openflow teams to build, deploy, and operate high-quality connectors and runtimes.