Staff Software Engineer — Engineering Systems, Continuous Integration

Snowflake•Bellevue, WA

12h•$236,000 - $339,200

About The Position

Snowflake’s Engineering Systems organization builds infrastructure, tools, and platforms that help engineers develop, test, and deliver high-quality software. The Continuous Integration team owns systems supporting builds, tests, validation, and developer workflows across Snowflake’s engineering organization. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will help define the technical direction of critical CI infrastructure used by thousands of engineers across a rapidly growing, multi-cloud codebase. You will own the architecture and technical direction of large-scale CI services, design and operate distributed systems for reliable and secure software delivery, and lead capabilities that improve build reliability, test execution, developer productivity, and release velocity. The role partners with engineering leadership, product managers, and teams across Snowflake to set technical roadmaps and make architectural decisions across build systems, test orchestration, resource scheduling, workflow execution, and developer tooling. You will identify systemic bottlenecks, establish high engineering standards, mentor engineers, lead complex cross-team projects, participate in incident response and root-cause analysis, and evaluate emerging technologies and industry practices.

Requirements

7+ years of industry experience designing and building production software systems.
A track record of technical leadership across complex, multi-team engineering initiatives.
Deep experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale.
Experience building or significantly evolving enterprise-grade Continuous Integration or Continuous Delivery systems.
Strong computer science fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, distributed systems, and systems design.
Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Java, C++, Python, or Go.
Experience making architectural decisions involving scalability, reliability, performance, security, and maintainability.
A strong understanding of developer productivity and the software development lifecycle.
Excellent problem-solving skills and sound technical judgment.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly.
A collaborative mindset and demonstrated ability to mentor and influence engineers across teams.

Nice To Haves

Experience with CI/CD and build systems such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Bazel, ArgoCD, or comparable platforms.
Experience with build optimization, caching, parallel execution, incremental builds, or distributed test scheduling.
Experience designing multi-tenant systems with strong isolation, reliability, performance, and security requirements.
Experience with Kubernetes, containers, or public cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
Experience operating large-scale developer platforms or engineering infrastructure.
Experience with observability, monitoring, alerting, and production operations.
Experience authoring technical roadmaps, architecture documents, project plans, postmortems, and root-cause analyses.
Experience working with data systems, distributed storage, or cloud-based services.
A history of improving engineering practices and multiplying the effectiveness of teams.

Responsibilities

Own the technical direction and architecture of large-scale Continuous Integration services and infrastructure.
Design, build, and operate distributed systems that support reliable, performant, and secure software delivery.
Lead the development of CI capabilities that improve build reliability, test execution, developer productivity, and release velocity.
Partner with engineering leadership, product managers, and teams across Snowflake to define quarterly and long-term technical roadmaps.
Drive architectural decisions across build systems, test orchestration, resource scheduling, workflow execution, and developer tooling.
Identify systemic bottlenecks in the software delivery lifecycle and develop solutions that improve engineering efficiency at scale.
Establish high standards for design, code quality, testing, observability, reliability, and operational readiness.
Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, technical guidance, and collaborative problem-solving.
Lead complex projects involving multiple teams and cross-functional dependencies.
Participate in incident response, root-cause analysis, and long-term reliability improvements.
Evaluate emerging technologies and industry practices to keep Snowflake’s developer platform scalable and effective.