Director of Engineering - Traffic & Networking
Engineering Manager · Director · Full Time
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Role
What you'll do.
Lead Snowflake's global traffic and networking infrastructure as Director of Engineering, overseeing the circulatory system that powers the Data Cloud. This role requires 15+ years of software engineering experience with 5+ years leading engineering teams, managing multi-cloud networking at petabyte scale across AWS, Azure, and GCP. You'll architect domain management, ingress/egress optimization, and service-to-service communication systems while mentoring industry veterans and shaping the technical roadmap for billions of daily queries.
Responsibilities
- Set Strategic Vision and Accountability: Define and own the multi-year roadmap for Snowflake's networking foundation, including traffic optimization, domain management, and connectivity models. Establish clear architectural goals that align with company objectives while ensuring accountability for complex plan execution and measurable deliverables across engineering teams.
- Lead Multi-Cloud Infrastructure Scaling: Guide your team in architecting and building software solutions that automate and scale networking infrastructure across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Design systems that handle billions of queries daily while optimizing costs, latency, and resource utilization across multiple cloud environments.
- Drive Innovation and Technical Excellence: Lead projects from conception through design, implementation, and production deployment. Champion high-performance networking patterns, security hardening, and abstraction layers that simplify complexity for downstream teams. Collaborate across distributed teams in the US, Ireland, Poland, and beyond.
- Provide Deep Technical Leadership: Maintain hands-on technical expertise in distributed systems, cloud networking, observability, and traffic engineering. Provide architectural guidance on critical decisions, code reviews for foundational systems, and technical mentorship for senior engineers working on the traffic stack.
- Recruit and Build High-Performing Teams: Actively source, interview, and hire exceptional engineers including industry veterans and emerging technical leaders. Build a diverse team with deep expertise in systems engineering, networking, infrastructure automation, and cloud platforms while fostering a collaborative engineering culture.
- Mentor and Develop Engineering Leaders: Oversee career development of direct reports through regular one-on-ones, coaching, and growth opportunities. Develop your managers and senior engineers into leaders, creating a pipeline of technical talent and fostering a culture of continuous learning and innovation.
- Ensure Operational Excellence and Reliability: Establish and maintain high operational standards with 99.99%+ uptime targets. Dynamically allocate resources to respond to production incidents, implement observability improvements, and drive postmortem processes that strengthen reliability while maintaining velocity.
- Modernize and Evolve Infrastructure: Lead initiatives to modernize legacy networking infrastructure, build new observability and monitoring capabilities, and design next-generation connectivity models. Ensure seamless ingress, egress, and internal service-to-service communication for thousands of customers globally.
Qualifications
What we look for.
Technical
Distributed Systems Architecture
Proven expertise designing and operating large-scale distributed systems handling petabyte-scale data flows, multi-tenant architectures, and thousands of concurrent services. Deep understanding of consensus algorithms, service discovery, load balancing, and network protocols at production scale.
Multi-Cloud Platform Expertise
Hands-on experience architecting and managing infrastructure across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Proficiency with cross-cloud networking, VPC management, CDN strategies, and provider-specific networking services including load balancing and DDoS mitigation.
Networking and Traffic Engineering
Strong foundation in networking fundamentals including TCP/IP, DNS, BGP, traffic routing, and performance optimization. Experience building or leading teams that build custom networking infrastructure, proxies, or service mesh solutions at scale.
Infrastructure Observability and Debugging
Expertise in designing monitoring, logging, and alerting systems for complex distributed infrastructure. Experience with tools like Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, Jaeger, or equivalent for infrastructure metrics, traces, and analysis.
SaaS and Multi-Tenant Systems at Scale
Deep experience operating billion-transaction-per-day SaaS systems with multi-tenant or multi-single-tenant architectures. Understanding of resource isolation, billing systems, tenant lifecycle management, and operational challenges of managing thousands of customers globally.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or Related Field
Formal education in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, or equivalent technical discipline providing foundational knowledge in algorithms, systems, and networks.
Master's or PhD (Preferred)
Advanced degree in Computer Science or related field demonstrating deep theoretical knowledge and research experience in distributed systems, networking, or infrastructure optimization. Equivalent practical experience in building infrastructure systems acceptable.
Equivalent Practical Experience
Demonstrated expertise through shipped systems, open-source contributions, technical publications, or portfolio of production infrastructure work. For exceptionally strong candidates, practical experience can substitute for formal education requirements.
Experience
15+ Years of Software Engineering
Extensive track record building production software systems, from individual contributor to team leader. Experience spans multiple languages, frameworks, and domains with demonstrated ability to architect solutions that ship at scale.
5+ Years Leading Engineering Teams
Proven management experience leading engineering managers and senior engineers, not just individual contributors. Track record of building high-performing teams, establishing technical culture, and scaling organizations during periods of rapid growth.
Production Infrastructure Leadership
Direct experience owning or co-owning critical infrastructure systems in production environments. Demonstrated ability to balance velocity with stability, make architectural trade-offs, and lead teams through infrastructure modernization initiatives.
Cross-Functional Collaboration at Enterprise Scale
Experience working effectively with product, security, operations, and finance teams to align infrastructure decisions with business goals. Ability to communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and translate business requirements into architectural solutions.
Skills
Required
Distributed Systems Design
Architecting and implementing systems handling massive scale, high availability, and fault tolerance. Experience with load distribution, service orchestration, and handling failure scenarios across infrastructure.
Cloud Infrastructure Management
Building and operating Infrastructure-as-Code solutions, managing cloud resources efficiently, and optimizing costs while maintaining performance and reliability.
Leadership and Team Building
Building, mentoring, and scaling engineering teams. Hiring top talent, establishing team culture, and developing other technical leaders. Experience managing through matrix organizations or across geographies.
Technical Communication
Translating complex networking and infrastructure concepts for diverse audiences including executives, product teams, and engineers. Writing clear design documents and architectural proposals that drive decisions.
Production Operations
Running production systems reliably, debugging complex issues, implementing observability, and driving incident response and postmortem processes. Experience with SRE principles and operational excellence.
Networking Fundamentals
Deep understanding of network protocols, DNS, load balancing, traffic routing, and performance optimization. Experience with both networking infrastructure and application-layer networking patterns.
Preferred
Open Source Infrastructure Projects
Nice to haveContributions to or leadership of open-source infrastructure projects like Kubernetes, service meshes, or networking projects. Demonstrates deep systems thinking and community collaboration.
Previous Startup or Scale-Up Experience
Nice to haveBackground at high-growth companies where you've experienced rapid scaling challenges, architectural pivots, and operating with limited resources while maintaining quality.
Data Platform or Data Warehouse Experience
Nice to havePrior experience at data companies, data warehouses, or analytics platforms. Understanding of data pipeline architecture, query routing, and the unique networking challenges of handling massive data volumes.
Security and Compliance Expertise
Nice to haveHands-on experience designing secure systems, implementing data protection measures, and managing compliance requirements (SOC 2, HIPAA, etc.). Understanding of threat models and security hardening practices.
Public Speaking and Technical Evangelism
Nice to haveExperience speaking at technical conferences, writing technical blog posts, or representing your company externally. Demonstrates ability to influence the broader engineering community.
Real-Time Systems Experience
Nice to haveBackground building or leading teams that build low-latency, high-throughput systems with strict performance requirements. Understanding of performance profiling, optimization, and hardware-software co-design.
Tech stack
Languages
Frameworks
Databases
Tools
Other
Compensation
Pay and benefits.
Base·USD 380,000 – 475,000
Equity·Stock options
Full posting
Original listing.
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 are looking for a visionary Director of Traffic and Networking to lead the group responsible for the very circulatory system of our global cloud infrastructure.
The Mission
Every query, every login, every byte of data in Snowflake's Data Cloud travels through the systems this team builds. The Traffic & Networking group is responsible for the ingress, egress, domain management, and internal networking layers that connect thousands of customers to Snowflake across public and private connectivity paths. We build and deploy software to enable seamless service-to-service and user-to-service communication across all traffic types spanning every environment and cloud provider Snowflake touches. Your goal is to ensure robust domain management, efficient traffic flow, and reliable connectivity while relentlessly improving product velocity, and operational efficiency.
What You Will Do
As a senior engineering leader at Snowflake, you will be expected to:
Set the Strategic Vision: Define the roadmap for Snowflake’s networking foundation and be accountable for the execution of complex plans and deliverables.
Scale Infrastructure: Guide your team in building software solutions that automate and scale networking across multiple cloud providers including AWS, Azure, and GCP.
Drive Innovation: Lead projects from initial idea through design and implementation, collaborating with teams in the US, Ireland, Poland, and beyond.
Technical Leadership: Provide deep technical expertise with a focus on high-performance, security, and the abstraction of complex cloud networking layers.
Build the Team: Actively recruit, hire, and grow a diverse team of industry veterans and rising stars.
Mentorship: Be responsible for the career development of your reports through continuous coaching and mentorship.
Operational Excellence: Shift resources dynamically to respond to production issues and customer needs, ensuring high levels of reliability.
Your Professional Profile
We are looking for an exceptional leader who views infrastructure through a product development lens.
Experience: 15+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5+ years in engineering management leading leaders.
Distributed Systems Expertise: Proven track record in designing systems and managing large-scale production infrastructure with a focus on networking, compute, or storage
Cloud Fluency: Strong hands-on experience with cloud service providers.
SaaS Background: Deep experience working at scale within a multi-tenant or multi-single-tenant SaaS model, handling billions of complex queries and massive traffic ingress/egress.
Communication: Excellent collaboration skills to bridge the gap between complex networking requirements and cross-functional business goals.
Education: BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Why Join This Team?
Impact: You're actively evolving a network architecture, building new observability capabilities, modernizing legacy infrastructure, and designing the next-generation connectivity model across multiple clouds. Every Snowflake team depends on what this group ships. Infrastructure is our product.
Growth: This role will push your technical and leadership boundaries in an environment that values practical decision-making and creativity.
Security First: You will play a critical role in upholding Snowflake’s high standards for data security and confidentiality.
Builder's Culture: We ship our own proxy infrastructure, our own service discovery, our own network automation. This is a build role for someone who wants to own the full traffic stack.
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
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