Staff Software Engineer – Engineering Systems, Continuous Integration Team

Snowflake•Bellevue, WA

5d•$236,000 - $339,200

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. We're hiring a Staff Software Engineer to help us build a world-class developer platform that fuels the Snowflake Data Cloud. As an engineer on the Continuous Integration team within Engineering Systems (ES), you will set the technical direction for and deliver the CI service that powers Snowflake's repositories and developer ecosystem. Together with industry-wide experts in distributed systems, cross-cloud development, and engineering excellence, you will evolve our developer infrastructure and tooling to be elastic, large-scale, and highly performant — with simplicity at its core. As a Staff Engineer on the CI team, you will help Snowflake realize its mission of becoming the premier Data Cloud by accelerating the delivery of high-quality software to production. You will set the technical standard for the team, drive architectural decisions, mentor engineers across the organization, and partner with product and engineering leadership to chart the quarterly and long-term roadmaps. You will ensure the team executes toward serving the current needs of its customers while staying ahead of technological trends and future demands.

Requirements

8+ years of industry experience designing and building distributed systems at scale
A track record of technical leadership — owning system architecture, driving design decisions, and raising the technical bar for a team or organization
Deep experience with enterprise-grade Continuous Integration for cloud-based distributed systems — you've built, scaled, or significantly evolved CI infrastructure at a comparable scale
Strong passion for making developers highly productive — you think about developer experience as a product and are energized by making engineers faster and happier
Excellent CS fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, distributed systems, and systems design
Fluency in Java, C++, Python, or Go — with the versatility to work across languages and systems
A strategic mindset — strong sense of what to prioritize for maximum impact and the ability to translate strategy into executable technical plans
Ability to mentor and influence — you elevate engineers around you through code reviews, design guidance, and technical mentorship
Excellent communication skills — both written and verbal — with the ability to articulate technical tradeoffs clearly to engineering and leadership audiences

Nice To Haves

Experience developing data systems or distributed systems internals
Hands-on experience with Jenkins, Bazel, ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, or other CI/CD suites at scale
Experience designing multi-tenant systems with focus on reliability, performance, isolation, and security
Proven experience authoring roadmap documents, technical design docs, project plans, and RCAs
Experience with build system optimization — caching strategies, parallelization, incremental builds, and resource scheduling
Background in developer tooling or platform engineering organizations

Responsibilities

Own the technical direction and architecture of Snowflake's CI platform — designing systems that scale reliably across thousands of developers, millions of builds, and a rapidly growing multi-repository codebase
Lead the design and implementation of distributed CI services that are elastic, performant, and fault-tolerant across cloud providers
Drive the CI platform strategy — partner with product managers and engineering leadership to define quarterly and long-term roadmaps that balance customer needs with technical innovation
Set the engineering bar for the team through code reviews, design reviews, and architectural guidance — ensuring the CI platform is built with the quality and rigor expected of enterprise-grade infrastructure
Identify and resolve systemic technical challenges — from build performance and resource efficiency to multi-tenant isolation, reliability, and security
Mentor and develop engineers on the team — elevate technical judgment, design quality, and engineering craftsmanship across the group
Stay ahead of the curve — evaluate and adopt emerging CI/CD technologies, tooling patterns, and industry best practices to keep Snowflake's developer platform at the leading edge
Be a key stakeholder in cross-team initiatives that affect developer productivity — collaborating with adjacent ES teams and engineering leadership to shape the broader developer experience