Staff Software Engineer, Cortex AI Functions

Snowflake • Bellevue, WA

1d • $236,000 - $339,200

About The Position

Snowflake seeks a Staff Software Engineer for its Cortex AI Functions team, which makes multimodal data—such as PDFs, images, audio, and video—agent-ready and useful for analytics at enterprise scale. The team brings semantic operators such as extraction, classification, filtering, joins, summarization, and aggregation into SQL, allowing customers to work with structured and unstructured data in Snowflake queries and pipelines. Its work connects AI quality with database systems through AI-aware query planning, adaptive model selection, and semantic query optimization.

The Staff Software Engineer serves as technical lead for a group of 2–4 engineers and independently drives large projects from problem definition and architecture through implementation, launch, and production outcomes. Depending on their area of expertise, the engineer will advance AI quality and applied modeling or database systems. The role also involves shaping product direction with product managers and leadership, coordinating partner teams, mentoring engineers, and contributing hands-on to design and implementation.

Snowflake describes its preferred colleagues as AI-native, curious, low-ego, experimental, and comfortable in dynamic, fast-moving environments. Salary and benefits information for U.S.-located jobs is available on the Snowflake Careers Site; specific figures and benefits are not included in this posting.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of relevant experience in software engineering, applied machine learning, or database systems.
• Experience independently leading multi-engineer projects from definition through production.
• Deep expertise in either AI quality and applied modeling or database systems, supported by substantial technical contributions and measurable production impact; expertise in both is not required.
• Strong fundamentals in algorithms, data structures, and software design.
• Fluency in at least one of C++, Java, or Python.
• Strong debugging and testing skills.
• An empirical approach to problem solving, using clear metrics, disciplined experiments, root-cause analysis, and sound tradeoffs between quality, cost, and latency.
• Strong product sense and a track record of co-defining product direction with product managers and leadership, connecting technical investments to customer value and business outcomes.
• For AI quality expertise: depth in modeling, evaluation methodology, statistical experimentation, data quality, error analysis, and automated optimization.
• For database systems expertise: depth in query optimizers, compilers, execution engines, distributed data processing, and performance analysis.

Nice To Haves

• For AI quality candidates, hands-on experience with model fine-tuning and post-training is a plus but not required.
• Familiarity with AI infrastructure is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Serve as technical lead for a group of 2–4 engineers and drive large projects from problem definition and architecture through implementation, launch, and production outcomes.
• For AI quality initiatives, define model strategies suited to product needs, balancing accuracy, cost, and latency.
• Drive AI evaluation, error analysis, prompt optimization, and model adaptation, including fine-tuning and post-training where appropriate.
• Partner with infrastructure teams on model-specific hosting and inference optimizations, and validate their effects on quality and performance.
• For database systems initiatives, advance AI-aware query planning, compiler optimizations, distributed execution, scheduling, and safe result reuse within SQL and data pipelines.
• Connect quality objectives with execution decisions; diagnose bottlenecks and improve correctness, reliability, observability, and efficiency across data processing workflows.
• Co-define product capabilities, priorities, success metrics, and business strategy with product managers and leadership, translating customer needs into product direction.
• Align partner teams and manage dependencies through delivery.
• Break complex projects into milestones, delegate work, unblock and mentor engineers, and maintain technical quality through hands-on contributions and design and code reviews.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed