Engineering Manager - Cloud Efficiency

Engineering Manager · Manager · Full Time

US-WA-BellevueUSD 236k – 339k1mo ago
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Role

What you'll do.

Lead Snowflake's Cloud Efficiency engineering team as an Engineering Manager responsible for developing a unified, self-serve cloud cost optimization platform that makes resource usage and spend attributable and governable across billions of dollars in annual cloud infrastructure. This role combines technical leadership with people management, requiring experience building large-scale distributed systems, leading engineering teams through multi-quarter roadmaps, and driving innovation in FinOps and cost optimization tooling. You'll partner cross-functionally with Product, Finance, and Data Science to translate company-level spend objectives into engineering systems that deliver insights and drive cloud optimization at massive scale.

Responsibilities

  • Lead and Grow Engineering Team: Build and mentor a talented team of software engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, ownership, continuous learning, and innovation in cloud infrastructure optimization. Manage hiring, performance development, career growth, and retention of high-performing engineering talent while creating psychological safety for experimentation and calculated risk-taking.
  • Define Cloud Efficiency Technical Roadmap: Translate company-level cloud spend objectives into a comprehensive engineering roadmap that delivers authoritative cost data systems, resource ownership registries, attribution pipelines, cost and unit economics modeling, observability platforms, governance policies, and optimization workflows. Prioritize initiatives based on impact, feasibility, and strategic alignment while balancing short-term delivery with long-term platform health.
  • Set Backend and Data Architecture Strategy: Establish technical direction for backend systems, data pipelines, APIs, and infrastructure that measure, attribute, and surface cost and usage insights at massive scale. Make architectural decisions around data processing, storage, retrieval, and visualization that support real-time insights and enable AI-driven optimization.
  • Own End-to-End Delivery: Drive full project lifecycle ownership from planning and requirements scoping through technical design reviews, implementation execution, production launch, monitoring, and iterative improvements based on customer feedback and performance metrics. Establish quality gates and excellence standards that balance velocity with system reliability and maintainability.
  • Drive Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner seamlessly with Product, Engineering leadership, Finance, Data Science, and other teams to ensure smooth system integrations, alignment on metrics and definitions, and end-to-end customer success. Represent the Cloud Efficiency team in broader engineering initiatives, contribute to company-wide technical standards, and advocate for platform investments.
  • Represent Team in Technical Forums: Participate in engineering-wide technical discussions, design reviews, and strategy sessions. Contribute to Snowflake's technical culture by sharing best practices, mentoring peers across teams, and helping shape the company's approach to cloud infrastructure and cost optimization.

Qualifications

What we look for.

Technical

  • Distributed Systems Design and Implementation

    Deep hands-on experience architecting and building distributed systems at scale, including understanding of consistency models, fault tolerance, replication, and optimization techniques. Ability to design systems that handle billions of data points and real-time processing at scale.

  • Data Engineering and Pipelines

    Strong background building data pipelines, ETL/ELT systems, and data infrastructure that processes, transforms, and serves large volumes of data. Experience with stream processing, batch processing, and real-time data integration across multiple sources and systems.

  • Cloud Infrastructure and FinOps

    Demonstrated expertise building cost management, budgeting, billing systems, or FinOps tooling in AWS, Azure, or GCP environments. Understanding of cloud resource optimization, reserved instances, spot pricing, cost allocation, chargeback mechanisms, and cloud consumption patterns.

  • Anomaly Detection and Time-Series Analysis

    Experience implementing anomaly detection algorithms, time-series forecasting, and statistical analysis for operational monitoring or cost optimization. Familiarity with ML-driven approaches to identifying unusual spending patterns and optimization opportunities.

  • Backend APIs and Services Architecture

    Proven ability designing and building scalable backend APIs, microservices, and internal tools that serve high volumes of requests. Experience with API design patterns, authentication, rate limiting, and creating developer-friendly platforms.

Education

  • Computer Science or Related Field Degree

    Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or related quantitative field. Equivalent professional experience and demonstrated expertise also considered.

Experience

  • Software Engineering Leadership (3+ Years)

    Minimum 3 years as an engineering manager or technical leader managing teams through the design and delivery of large-scale production systems. Proven track record hiring, mentoring, developing, and retaining strong engineering talent with demonstrated impact on team performance and career growth.

  • Total Software Engineering Career (9+ Years)

    Minimum 9 years of progressive software engineering experience building production systems, with solid foundation in distributed systems, backend development, or data engineering. Demonstrates ability to grow from individual contributor to leadership roles.

  • Multi-Quarter Roadmap Execution

    Track record defining, communicating, and executing multi-quarter technical roadmaps in complex environments. Demonstrated ability to balance short-term delivery commitments with long-term platform health, technical debt management, and strategic initiatives.

  • Cross-Functional Executive Communication

    Proven ability distilling complex technical problems and solutions for executive audiences including CFOs, finance teams, and business stakeholders. Strong communication skills translating between technical and business contexts while motivating engineers around shared vision and company objectives.

  • Large-Scale Production Systems

    Experience building and operating production systems at massive scale handling billions of transactions, high throughput, or substantial data volumes. Comfortable making architectural tradeoffs between performance, reliability, consistency, and operational complexity.

Skills

Required

  • Engineering Team Leadership

    Demonstrated ability to build, mentor, and lead engineering teams through complex projects. Excellent coaching and feedback skills, with proven ability developing future technical leaders and building high-performing organizations.

  • Distributed Systems Architecture

    Strong fundamentals in building distributed systems including consensus algorithms, fault tolerance, load balancing, and optimization at scale. Ability to make sound architectural tradeoffs between consistency, availability, and partition tolerance.

  • Strategic Roadmap Development

    Capability to define multi-quarter technical strategies that align with business objectives, balance competing priorities, and drive execution. Ability to communicate vision, build team alignment, and adapt to changing priorities.

  • Cloud Cost Management

    Experience with cloud infrastructure cost management, billing systems, or FinOps practices in AWS, Azure, or GCP. Understanding of cloud economics, resource optimization, and cost attribution methodologies.

  • Data Pipeline Development

    Hands-on experience building and operating data pipelines, ETL systems, and infrastructure for processing large-scale data. Understanding of data quality, consistency, and performance considerations.

  • Hands-On Technical Problem Solving

    Strong ability to drill deep into complex system designs and implementations, review code, and provide technical guidance. Comfortable debugging distributed systems issues and making architectural decisions based on technical analysis.

  • Executive Communication

    Ability to communicate technical complexity to non-technical audiences including finance and business stakeholders. Skilled at translating between technical and business contexts while maintaining accuracy and clarity.

Preferred

  • AI and Machine Learning Integration

    Nice to have

    Experience incorporating AI, machine learning, or anomaly detection into operational tools or cost optimization products. Understanding of how to leverage ML models for intelligent resource optimization and predictive analytics.

  • Kubernetes and Container Orchestration

    Nice to have

    Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, container orchestration, or cluster management. Understanding of operational challenges, cost implications, and optimization opportunities in containerized environments.

  • FinOps and Cost Optimization Tools

    Nice to have

    Direct experience building or working with FinOps platforms, cost allocation tools, or chargeback systems. Familiarity with common challenges in cloud cost management and industry best practices.

  • CI/CD and DevOps Infrastructure

    Nice to have

    Experience building or operating CI/CD systems, deployment infrastructure, and observability platforms at scale. Understanding of how infrastructure decisions impact organizational efficiency and cost.

  • Big Data and Analytics Systems

    Nice to have

    Background with big data technologies, data warehouses, analytics platforms, or time-series databases. Experience with data modeling for analytical workloads and performance optimization.

  • Open Source Contribution

    Nice to have

    Active participation in open-source projects, particularly in cloud infrastructure, data systems, or DevOps tooling. Demonstrates commitment to engineering excellence and community engagement.

Tech stack

Languages

GoPythonJavaSQL

Frameworks

KubernetesApache SparkKafkagRPC

Databases

SnowflakePostgreSQLCassandraClickHouse

Tools

PrometheusGrafanaTerraformAWSGit

Other

Machine Learning for Cost OptimizationCloud Cost Accounting PracticesDistributed Tracing and ObservabilityAPI Design and Development

Compensation

Pay and benefits.

Base·USD 236,000 – 339,200

Equity·Stock options

Benefits

  • Competitive Equity and Stock Options

    Participate in Snowflake's growth through meaningful equity grants and stock option programs, aligning your success with company performance.

  • Comprehensive Health Coverage

    Medical, dental, and vision insurance with flexible plan options and low employee contributions. HSA and FSA programs available for tax-advantaged savings.

  • Retirement Planning

    401(k) plan with company matching contributions to support long-term financial security and retirement planning.

  • Generous Time Off

    Unlimited paid time off policy, paid holidays, and flexible work arrangements to maintain work-life balance and support personal well-being.

  • Professional Development

    Learning and development budget, conference attendance support, and internal training programs to accelerate career growth and technical skills.

  • Parental Leave

    Paid parental leave programs for all parents, supporting family planning and work-life integration.

  • Mental Health and Wellness

    Comprehensive mental health support including counseling services, stress management programs, and fitness benefits.

  • Flexible Work Environment

    Remote work options and flexible office hours supporting productivity and personal circumstances.

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.

Engineering Manager, Cloud Efficiency

Snowflake runs large scale cloud infrastructure to deliver its own service — production and internal deployments, Kubernetes fleets, CI/CD, etc. Our cloud spend is in billions of dollars per year. We are looking for an experienced Engineering Manager to lead the Cloud Efficiency engineering team. In this role, you will own the technical vision and execution for building a unified, self-serve cloud efficiency platform along with AI skills and agents that makes resource usage and spend attributable and governable while driving insights and optimization of our cloud spend.


AS AN ENGINEERING MANAGER IN CLOUD EFFICIENCY, YOU WILL:

  • Lead and grow our talented team of software engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, ownership, and continuous learning.

  • Drive the roadmap for Cloud Efficiency — translating company-level spend objectives into engineering systems: authoritative cost data, resource ownership registry, attribution pipelines, cost and unit economics modeling, observability, governance policies, and optimization workflows — in partnership with Product, Engineering, Finance, and Data Science.

  • Set technical strategy for backend systems, data pipelines, and APIs that measure, attribute and surface cost and usage insights at massive scale.

  • Own delivery end-to-end: from planning and scoping to design reviews, execution, launch, and iterations based on customer feedback.

  • Partner cross-functionally with other engineering and cross functional teams to ensure smooth integrations and end customer success.

  • Represent your team in broader technical discussions, contributing to Snowflake engineering-wide initiatives and best practices.

We are looking for candidates with:

  • 9+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years in an engineering management role leading teams in designing and building large scale systems in production.

  • Strong technical foundation in distributed systems, data engineering, or cloud-native backend development.

  • Demonstrated ability to define and execute multi-quarter technical roadmaps while balancing short-term delivery and long-term platform health.

  • Experience building cost management, budgeting, billing or FinOps tooling in a cloud environment (AWS, Azure, or GCP).

  • Experience with anomaly detection, time-series analysis, or ML-driven cost optimization products.

  • Excellent communication skills: able to distill complex technical problems for executive audiences and motivate engineers around a shared vision.

  • Track record of hiring, growing, and retaining strong engineering talent.

  • Strong hands-on skills. Can drill deep into complex system designs and implementation.

  • BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience.

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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