Staff Software Engineer - Metadata
About The Position
Snowflake is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for its Metadata team, which builds the metadata layer that underpins queries, tables, transactions, permissions, and cross-region and cross-cloud replication. The team’s systems handle millions of metadata operations per second and help keep customer data available through outages. The role focuses on leading the design and technical direction of core metadata and replication systems across teams, addressing distributed-systems challenges at global scale, and improving reliability and operational practices. The position also partners with Product and architects to translate customer needs into durable designs and mentors senior engineers and technical leaders.
Requirements
- 10+ years building large-scale distributed systems or database internals.
- Strong development skills in Java or C++.
- A proven record of leading multi-team technical initiatives from design to production.
- Deep understanding of consistency, transactions, and fault tolerance.
- BS/MS in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with FoundationDB or other distributed key-value stores.
- Experience building replication, disaster recovery, or geo-distributed systems.
- Experience with database metadata, catalogs, or query compilation.
- Experience running services on AWS, Azure, or GCP.
Responsibilities
- Lead the design of core metadata and replication systems across multiple teams.
- Set technical direction for the scalability, consistency, and fault tolerance of the metadata layer.
- Drive cross-region and cross-cloud replication toward lower RPO and higher reliability.
- Solve performance, availability, and correctness problems at global scale.
- Partner with Product and architects to translate customer needs into durable designs.
- Improve operational practices through observability, safe rollouts, and blast-radius controls.
- Mentor senior engineers and grow technical leaders on the team.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
