Software Engineer — Platform

Snorkel AI•New York City, NY

About The Position

About Snorkel At Snorkel, we believe meaningful AI doesn’t start with the model, it starts with the data. We’re on a mission to help enterprises transform expert knowledge into specialized AI at scale. The AI landscape has gone through incredible changes since 2015, when Snorkel started as a research project in the Stanford AI Lab, to the generative AI breakthroughs of today. But one thing has remained constant: the data you use to build AI is the key to achieving differentiation, high performance, and production-ready systems. We work with some of the world’s largest organizations to empower scientists, engineers, financial experts, product creators, journalists, and more to build custom AI with their data faster than ever before. Excited to help us redefine how AI is built? Apply to be the newest Snorkeler! About the Team Snorkel's Platform organization owns the infrastructure and services that power everything at Snorkel — the pipelines, evals, access layers, event systems, governance, compute, and agent infrastructure that every product team and customer deployment depends on. We're a small team with a large surface area, and we're in the middle of a foundational architecture shift: moving from a single-database data path to a multi-source, event-driven agent first platform. The decisions being made now will define how our platform scales for years. You will be making them. About the Role We're looking for Platform Engineers who combine strong infrastructure chops with real backend engineering depth. You'll build and operate the systems, services, and agent infrastructure that let product teams move fast and reliably — from data access layers and event-driven pipelines to the agent first architecture that will transform our ability to scale. Your work will directly allow us to scale the amount of high quality data we are able to deliver to our customers. We are looking to grow our team of Platform Engineers, and are hiring at multiple levels.

Requirements

5+ years building platform infrastructure, backend services, or data systems in production — you have built and operated pipelines, data access layers, distributed services, or ETL/ELT systems at scale
Strong proficiency in Python, and experience designing REST APIs for internal services and developers
Strong background in distributed systems and cloud platforms (AWS preferred) — hands-on experience with services like S3, RDS, EKS, EventBridge, and IAM, and comfort working in a Terraform-managed environment
Familiarity with data orchestration tools (Prefect, Airflow, or Dagster) and transformation frameworks (dbt)
Understanding of data governance concepts — RBAC, PII handling, audit logging, data lineage
Track record of leading complex engineering initiatives, influencing stakeholders, and delivering measurable impact
Ability to work in a fast-paced environment with strong technical communication skills
Fluency with modern developer tooling and a willingness to adopt new tools quickly — the team evaluates and integrates new tooling regularly to improve velocity and reliability

Nice To Haves

Experience building shared libraries or SDKs consumed by multiple teams — versioning, backwards compatibility, migration support
Experience with event-driven architectures — CDC, event buses, schema registries, at-least-once delivery semantics
Experience with OpenTelemetry, ClickHouse, or similar observability infrastructure
Prior work in regulated environments (SOC 2, FedRAMP, HIPAA) where compliance requirements shaped system design
Experience with Ray or similar frameworks for distributed compute workloads
Experience in hyper-growth startup environments or scaling engineering orgs
Prior experience as a Tech Lead, Team Lead, or hands-on Engineering Manager

Responsibilities

Design and build agent infrastructure that allows us to safely and reliably speed up workflows from engineering and operation teams
Design and implement event-driven data flows using event brokers, CDC connectors, schema registries, event routing, and dead letter queues — ensuring events flow reliably and failures are visible and recoverable
Build the systems that track how data moves through the platform (lineage), enforce who can access what (governance and RBAC), and log what happened (auditing), including PII handling, retention policy enforcement, and audit infrastructure for enterprise and regulatory compliance
Set strategy and architecture for build systems, testing frameworks, and CI/CD pipelines, and drive the transition toward robust, automated continuous deployment
Instrument services with OpenTelemetry, define and monitor SLOs (query latency, pipeline success rates, service reliability), and build alerting that catches issues before they become incidents — you will be on-call for the systems you build
Contribute to infrastructure cost visibility and optimization — query cost estimation, workload right-sizing, and routing data to the most cost-effective storage tier for its access pattern
Collaborate with engineers, product managers, and designers to bring consistency and high standards to codebases, infrastructure, and processes

Benefits

Meaningful ownership over the infrastructure and services that every product team and customer deployment depends on.
Opportunity to make foundational architecture decisions that shape how the company scales.
A team that cares deeply about reliability, craft, and moving fast without breaking things.
Market proven solutions, robust funding, and scaling rapidly.
Unique combination of stability and the excitement of high growth.
Meaningful opportunities to shape priorities and initiatives.
Influence key strategic decisions.
Directly impact our ongoing success.
Support for deepening technical expertise, exploring leadership opportunities, or learning new skills across multiple functions.
An environment designed for growth, learning, and shared success.