Software Engineer - Observe

Snowflake • Menlo Park, CA

1d

About The Position

At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise, seeking AI-native thinkers who are energized by the opportunity to reinvent how they work, treating AI as a high-trust collaborator. We look for low-ego individuals who thrive in dynamic, fast-moving environments and move with an experimental mindset. Observe by Snowflake is an AI-powered observability platform built on the Snowflake AI Data Cloud, engineered for scale. It ingests and stores logs, metrics, traces, and events on an open, scalable data lakehouse using open formats like Apache Iceberg, at dramatically lower cost. A dynamic Context Graph and chat-based AI SRE provide rich context and automated workflows for faster detection to root cause and resolution. Leading engineering teams rely on Observe to troubleshoot hundreds of terabytes of telemetry daily while maintaining reliability at enterprise scale. As part of Snowflake, Observe combines startup-style ownership and velocity with the global reach, operational excellence, and ecosystem of one of the world's leading data platforms. We are hiring a Software Engineer for our Data Intake team, which builds the agent, ingestion infrastructure, and in-product onboarding experience that connects customer systems to Observe. Our goal is to make data ingestion self-serve, transparent, and diagnosable so customers can understand exactly where their telemetry is flowing or failing.

Requirements

• 2+ years of experience in software engineering with a focus on backend systems, distributed systems, or infrastructure (or equivalent experience)
• Proficiency in Go or another statically typed language, with genuine interest in developing deep Go expertise
• Experience with distributed systems, data pipelines, or agent-based software architectures
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, container orchestration, and cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or similar), or strong motivation to develop this expertise
• Comfort reading, navigating, and reasoning about large open-source codebases and systems you did not originally write
• A systematic approach to debugging distributed systems and pipelines across production environments
• Ability to move fluidly between configuration, infrastructure, and application code to understand and fix real-world system behavior
• A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience

Nice To Haves

• Experience with OpenTelemetry, observability agents, or telemetry pipeline architectures
• Background building or operating control planes for distributed systems or agent infrastructure
• Prior work on developer onboarding flows, configuration management, or user-facing diagnostics for infrastructure products
• Exposure to platform, infrastructure, or SRE-adjacent team environments

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the Observe Agent, a custom OpenTelemetry collector distribution, building receivers, processors, and exporters that collect and forward customer telemetry at scale
• Build and maintain configuration-heavy systems including OTel collector configs, Helm charts, Kubernetes manifests, and AWS infrastructure templates
• Design and implement control-plane APIs and data models that represent ingestion state, pipeline errors, and operational events for both internal tooling and user-facing experiences
• Collaborate with product and platform teams to deliver in-product onboarding flows that help customers connect their systems and validate data is flowing correctly
• Debug complex ingestion issues spanning agents, pipelines, and backend systems, often across codebases and environments you did not originally build
• Translate low-level distributed system behavior into clear, actionable signals that engineering and customer-facing teams can act on
• Participate in code reviews, design discussions, and contribute to a team culture that values clarity, diagnosability, and systems that are easy to reason about

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Number of Employees: 1,001-5,000 employees