# Director of Engineering - Traffic & Networking
**Company:** [Snowflake](https://scaleengineer.com/companies/snowflake)
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.
**Role:** Engineering Manager
**Seniority:** Director
**Locations:** US-CA-Menlo Park
**Salary:** 380000–475000 USD
[Apply](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/snowflake/07aead0b-3d2a-4162-b578-5eb323230c1f)
Canonical: https://scaleengineer.com/jobs/snowflake/director-of-engineering-traffic-networking
---
## 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.

## Requirements

### education

- {"name":"Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or Related Field","description":"Formal education in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, or equivalent technical discipline providing foundational knowledge in algorithms, systems, and networks."}
- {"name":"Master's or PhD (Preferred)","description":"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."}
- {"name":"Equivalent Practical Experience","description":"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."}

### technical

- {"name":"Distributed Systems Architecture","description":"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."}
- {"name":"Multi-Cloud Platform Expertise","description":"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."}
- {"name":"Networking and Traffic Engineering","description":"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."}
- {"name":"Infrastructure Observability and Debugging","description":"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."}
- {"name":"SaaS and Multi-Tenant Systems at Scale","description":"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."}

### experience

- {"name":"15+ Years of Software Engineering","description":"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."}
- {"name":"5+ Years Leading Engineering Teams","description":"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."}
- {"name":"Production Infrastructure Leadership","description":"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."}
- {"name":"Cross-Functional Collaboration at Enterprise Scale","description":"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

- {"name":"Distributed Systems Design","description":"Architecting and implementing systems handling massive scale, high availability, and fault tolerance. Experience with load distribution, service orchestration, and handling failure scenarios across infrastructure."}
- {"name":"Cloud Infrastructure Management","description":"Building and operating Infrastructure-as-Code solutions, managing cloud resources efficiently, and optimizing costs while maintaining performance and reliability."}
- {"name":"Leadership and Team Building","description":"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."}
- {"name":"Technical Communication","description":"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."}
- {"name":"Production Operations","description":"Running production systems reliably, debugging complex issues, implementing observability, and driving incident response and postmortem processes. Experience with SRE principles and operational excellence."}
- {"name":"Networking Fundamentals","description":"Deep understanding of network protocols, DNS, load balancing, traffic routing, and performance optimization. Experience with both networking infrastructure and application-layer networking patterns."}

### preferred

- {"name":"Open Source Infrastructure Projects","description":"Contributions to or leadership of open-source infrastructure projects like Kubernetes, service meshes, or networking projects. Demonstrates deep systems thinking and community collaboration."}
- {"name":"Previous Startup or Scale-Up Experience","description":"Background at high-growth companies where you've experienced rapid scaling challenges, architectural pivots, and operating with limited resources while maintaining quality."}
- {"name":"Data Platform or Data Warehouse Experience","description":"Prior 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."}
- {"name":"Security and Compliance Expertise","description":"Hands-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."}
- {"name":"Public Speaking and Technical Evangelism","description":"Experience speaking at technical conferences, writing technical blog posts, or representing your company externally. Demonstrates ability to influence the broader engineering community."}
- {"name":"Real-Time Systems Experience","description":"Background 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

### tools

- {"name":"AWS Networking Services","description":"Deep expertise with VPC, Direct Connect, Transit Gateway, Network Load Balancer, Application Load Balancer, Route 53, and other AWS networking primitives."}
- {"name":"Azure Networking Services","description":"Proficiency with Virtual Networks, Azure ExpressRoute, Application Gateway, Traffic Manager, and other Azure networking and connectivity services."}
- {"name":"GCP Cloud Networking","description":"Experience with Google Cloud VPC, Interconnect, Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud DNS, and other GCP networking services for multi-cloud deployments."}
- {"name":"Observability and Monitoring","description":"Hands-on experience with monitoring platforms like Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, New Relic, or ELK Stack. Proficiency in metrics collection, dashboard creation, and alerting configuration."}
- {"name":"Container and Orchestration Tools","description":"Expertise with Docker, containerd, and container registry management. Experience deploying and managing containerized infrastructure at scale."}
- {"name":"CI/CD and Automation","description":"Experience with continuous integration and deployment platforms like Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar. Knowledge of deployment automation, testing infrastructure, and version control."}

### others

- {"name":"Proxy and Load Balancing Technologies","description":"Deep understanding of proxy technologies like HAProxy, Envoy, or custom proxy implementations. Experience building or managing load balancing layers that handle massive traffic volumes."}
- {"name":"DNS and Domain Management","description":"Expertise in DNS architecture, global load balancing through DNS, DNSSEC, and managing domain infrastructure across multiple cloud providers and geographic regions."}
- {"name":"BGP and Advanced Routing","description":"Knowledge of Border Gateway Protocol and advanced network routing for multi-cloud connectivity, failover, and optimizing traffic paths across infrastructure."}
- {"name":"Security Infrastructure","description":"Experience with DDoS mitigation, WAF implementations, certificate management, encryption in transit, and building secure communication channels across cloud infrastructure."}

### databases

- {"name":"Distributed Databases","description":"Experience with distributed database systems like Spanner, CockroachDB, or similar. Understanding of partitioning, replication, consistency models, and query optimization across distributed systems."}
- {"name":"Time-Series Databases","description":"Familiarity with time-series databases like Prometheus, TimescaleDB, ClickHouse, or similar for storing metrics and observability data from infrastructure systems."}

### languages

- {"name":"Go","description":"Modern systems language commonly used for infrastructure, networking, and service-oriented architecture. Preferred for building scalable backend services and networking tools at companies like Snowflake."}
- {"name":"Rust","description":"Systems language providing memory safety and performance critical for infrastructure components, networking stacks, and performance-sensitive services. Growing adoption in cloud infrastructure."}
- {"name":"Java or C++","description":"High-performance languages often used in data platforms and infrastructure systems. Experience with either language demonstrates ability to work with existing legacy systems or build performance-critical components."}
- {"name":"Python","description":"Widely used for infrastructure automation, scripting, observability tooling, and infrastructure-as-code. Common language for infrastructure management and operational tooling."}

### frameworks

- {"name":"gRPC","description":"Modern RPC framework built on HTTP/2 for efficient service-to-service communication. Widely used in cloud infrastructure for low-latency, high-throughput distributed systems."}
- {"name":"Service Mesh Technologies","description":"Expertise with service mesh platforms like Istio, Consul, or Linkerd for managing service-to-service communication, security, and observability in microservices architectures."}
- {"name":"Kubernetes","description":"Container orchestration platform for managing applications and infrastructure at scale. Essential for modern cloud-native deployment and infrastructure management."}
- {"name":"Infrastructure Orchestration","description":"Experience with Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar Infrastructure-as-Code tools for managing cloud resources programmatically and reproducibly across multiple environments."}

## Benefits

### benefits

## Compensation

- **max:** 350000
- **min:** 250000
- **currency:** USD
- **stockOptions:** true

## Interview process

### steps

## Full description
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](http://careers.snowflake.com)