Staff Software Engineer

Snowflake is about empowering enterprises to achieve their full potential - and people too. With a culture that's all in on impact, innovation, and collaboration, Snowflake is the sweet spot for building big, moving fast, and taking technology - and careers - to the next level.

The Snowflake Openflow team is building Snowflake's next-generation open, extensible, and secure data integration platform for real-time, scalable, bi-directional data movement, powered by Apache NiFi. We enable customers to move structured and multi-modal unstructured data across any source and any sink-Snowflake and non-Snowflake alike-through a single, cloud-native platform that supports batch and streaming, and flexible runtimes spanning Snowflake-managed (SPCS) and Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) data planes.

Our team includes original creators and core contributors to Apache NiFi and industry leaders in data integration, now focused on bringing NiFi's proven strengths-visual flows, rich connectors, and powerful routing-to Snowflake's AI Data Cloud at enterprise scale. We work end to end across high-performance runtimes, and curated connectors, partnering closely with product, field, and open-source communities to help customers continuously ingest data, power AI and analytics workloads, and make smarter decisions in real time.

• Design and build core components of Openflow's control plane and data plane, delivering reliable, scalable, and secure services that power real-time, bi-directional data movement for global customers.

• Implement and evolve distributed systems that handle batch and streaming workloads, enabling high-throughput, low-latency pipelines for structured and multi-modal unstructured data across Snowflake and non-Snowflake environments.

• Lead medium-to-large, complex projects end to end-from problem definition and technical design through implementation, rollout, and ongoing improvements-while keeping quality, reliability, and operability front of mind.

• Own key services in production, including monitoring, alerting, on-call participation, incident response, and post-incident reviews, ensuring we consistently meet our durability, availability, and performance goals.

• Drive engineering best practices in your area-code quality, testing, observability, security, and documentation-and help standardize patterns that improve the entire platform.

• Collaborate closely with product management, peer teams, and customers' needs to translate ambiguous requirements into clear technical plans and pragmatic milestones.

• Analyze and improve system performance and reliability, using metrics, profiling, and experimentation to identify bottlenecks and guide optimizations.

• Mentor and support other engineers on the team, providing thoughtful code reviews, design feedback, and technical guidance that help them grow.

• Contribute to the broader Openflow and Snowflake engineering community, sharing knowledge, improving common libraries and tooling, and influencing how we build and operate data integration systems.

• 10+ years of industry experience building and operating backend or platform services, with significant time spent on large-scale, distributed systems.

• Strong computer science fundamentals, including algorithms, data structures, systems design, and a solid understanding of how to apply them in production environments.

• Hands-on experience with distributed systems concepts, such as concurrency, replication, sharding/partitioning, streaming, and fault tolerance, and how they impact correctness and performance.

• Deep understanding of operating systems and networking basics, including multi-threading and concurrency, memory management, storage, and performance/debugging tools.

• Proficiency in Java or a similar object-oriented language (e.g., Scala, Go, C++), and comfort working with large, existing codebases as well as designing new components.

• Experience building cloud-native services on at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP), using containers and modern CI/CD, monitoring, and logging practices.

• A track record of delivering high-quality, maintainable solutions to complex problems, balancing long-term technical health with near-term impact.

• Strong collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to work effectively across teams and time zones, build consensus on designs, and clearly articulate trade-offs.

• BS in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience; advanced degrees are a plus but not required.

• (Bonus) Experience with data integration, streaming, or workflow systems (e.g., Apache NiFi, Kafka, Flink, Airflow) or data/analytics platforms is a strong plus.

Every Snowflake employee is expected to follow the company's confidentiality and security standards for handling sensitive data. Snowflake employees must abide by the company's data security plan as an essential part of their duties. It is every employee's duty to keep customer information secure and confidential.

Snowflake is growing fast, and we're scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth. We are looking for people who share our values, challenge ordinary thinking, and push the pace of innovation while building a future for themselves and Snowflake.

How do you want to make your impact?

For jobs located in the United States, please visit the job posting on the Snowflake Careers Site for salary and benefits information: careers.snowflake.com

The following represents the expected range of compensation for this role:

• The estimated base salary range for this role is $236,000 - $339,200.
• Additionally, this role is eligible to participate in Snowflake's bonus and equity plan.

The successful candidate's starting salary will be determined based on permissible, non-discriminatory factors such as skills, experience, and geographic location. This role is also eligible for a competitive benefits package that includes: medical, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance; 401(k) retirement plan; flexible spending & health savings account; at least 12 paid holidays; paid time off; parental leave; employee assistance program; and other company benefits.

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