Engineering Manager - Snowpark

Engineering Manager · Manager · Full Time

US-WA-BellevueUSD 236k – 339k2w ago
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Role

What you'll do.

Lead the engineering team building Snowpark, Snowflake's elastic, high-scale, cloud-native compute platform that enables AI, ML, and data science workloads at unprecedented scale. As an Engineering Manager, you'll provide technical and strategic direction to a highly productive team while driving the adoption of serverless compute patterns and distributed systems architecture. This role requires 8+ years of large-scale systems experience and 2+ years of management expertise to shape the future of data-driven computing.

Responsibilities

  • Technical Leadership and Roadmap Definition: Provide technical and strategic direction to define and build a comprehensive ecosystem of technologies and technical roadmap. Establish clear technical vision that aligns with Snowflake's data cloud mission and AI/ML platform objectives.
  • Complex Project Execution: Plan, lead, and execute complex technical projects through your engineering team that interact with diverse internal teams. Drive project delivery while managing cross-functional dependencies across the organization.
  • Market and Customer Trend Analysis: Anticipate future industry trends and evolving customer needs with accuracy, translating insights into strategic initiatives. Stay ahead of emerging patterns in serverless compute, distributed systems, and data workload requirements to inform product strategy.
  • Executive Influence and Investment Strategy: Influence leadership on technical direction and communicate product/team investment priorities or pivot needs. Present data-driven business cases for resource allocation and strategic initiatives to senior engineering leadership.
  • Process and Productivity Optimization: Create innovative tools, processes, and solutions that improve team productivity and engineering efficiency. Implement systems thinking to eliminate bottlenecks and accelerate delivery cycles across the Snowpark platform.
  • Platform Stability and Reliability: Identify and lead improvements to product stability, reliability, service health, and observability. Own the on-call experience, customer support quality, diagnosability frameworks, and operational manageability of the Snowpark compute platform.
  • Talent Development and Skill Building: Identify and systematically fill skill and expertise gaps within the engineering team. Mentor and guide engineers to grow strong technical expertise, fostering a culture of continuous learning and career development.

Qualifications

What we look for.

Technical

  • Distributed Systems Architecture

    Deep understanding of distributed systems design patterns, consensus algorithms, data consistency models, and scalability considerations for cloud platforms.

  • Cloud Computing Platforms

    Strong expertise with major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and their core services including compute, networking, storage, and managed services offerings.

  • Serverless Computing Paradigms

    Comprehensive knowledge of serverless architecture patterns, container orchestration, function-as-a-service technologies, and resource abstraction layers.

  • Data Engineering and Analytics

    Working knowledge of data warehousing, analytics platforms, data processing frameworks, and the operational requirements for data-intensive workloads.

Education

  • Computer Science or Related Field

    Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related discipline strongly preferred. Advanced degrees or equivalent professional certifications considered.

Experience

  • Large-Scale Distributed Systems Design

    8+ years of industry experience designing and building large-scale distributed systems platforms that accelerate product innovation and handle massive data throughput at scale.

  • Software Engineering Management

    2+ years of full-time Software Engineering Management experience leading technical teams, managing stakeholder expectations, and driving engineering excellence.

  • Cloud-Native Architecture

    Hands-on experience with cloud-native architectures and serverless compute platforms such as AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, or Google Cloud Run. Understanding of managed compute services and their operational patterns.

  • High-Performance Platform Development

    Proven track record of building and scaling high-performance, elastic, multi-tenant systems that serve diverse workloads and users at concurrent scale.

Skills

Required

  • Engineering Leadership

    Proven ability to lead and grow engineering teams, inspire technical excellence, set team culture, and drive accountability for delivery and quality metrics.

  • Technical Architecture Design

    Ability to design complex, scalable distributed systems architectures that meet performance, reliability, and cost objectives across cloud environments.

  • Cross-Functional Collaboration

    Strong interpersonal skills to influence product, infrastructure, and customer-facing teams. Ability to navigate organizational dynamics and build consensus on technical decisions.

  • Strategic Thinking

    Capability to translate business objectives into technical roadmaps, anticipate technology trends, and position the team for long-term competitive advantage.

  • Developer Productivity Focus

    Genuine passion for making developers highly productive and enabling them to succeed in their career growth. Strong commitment to removing friction from the development experience.

  • System Reliability Ownership

    Deep commitment to product stability, observability, and operational excellence. Experience implementing SLOs, monitoring frameworks, and incident response processes.

Preferred

  • Data Platform Experience

    Nice to have

    Background building data platforms, analytics systems, or data warehousing solutions. Experience understanding data workload patterns and optimization opportunities.

  • Machine Learning Operations

    Nice to have

    Familiarity with ML/MLOps infrastructure, model serving, feature engineering platforms, or data science enablement. Understanding of ML-specific performance and reliability requirements.

  • Kubernetes and Container Orchestration

    Nice to have

    Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Docker, container networking, and stateful workload management in production environments.

  • Database Systems Knowledge

    Nice to have

    Understanding of database internals, query optimization, indexing strategies, and distributed database design. Knowledge of both SQL and NoSQL systems beneficial.

  • Open Source Contribution

    Nice to have

    Active participation in open source projects, community engagement, or publishing technical content demonstrating thought leadership in distributed systems or cloud computing.

  • API and Integration Design

    Nice to have

    Experience designing intuitive APIs for data platforms, integration frameworks, and developer-facing tools that abstract complexity while exposing power.

Tech stack

Languages

PythonJava/ScalaSQL

Frameworks

Apache SparkKubernetesgRPC

Databases

Snowflake Data CloudApache IcebergPostgreSQL/MySQL

Tools

AWS Lambda/Azure Functions/Google Cloud RunGit and Version ControlDatadog/New Relic/PrometheusTerraform/CloudFormation

Other

Distributed Systems PatternsCloud Cost OptimizationData Workload OptimizationDevOps and CI/CD Practices

Compensation

Pay and benefits.

Base·USD 236,000 – 339,200

Equity·Stock options

Benefits

  • Equity and Stock Options

    Competitive equity package as part of total compensation reflecting your contribution to Snowflake's growth. Stock options vest over time aligning your interests with company success.

  • Health and Wellness Coverage

    Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance plans. Company covers significant portion of premiums for employees and their families.

  • Retirement Planning

    401(k) plan with employer matching contributions to help you build long-term financial security and retirement savings.

  • Professional Development

    Learning budgets, conference attendance, technical certification support, and internal training programs to advance your skills and expertise.

  • Work-Life Balance

    Generous paid time off, flexible working arrangements, and company-wide wellness initiatives supporting mental and physical health.

  • Parental and Family Benefits

    Comprehensive parental leave policies, fertility benefits, and family support services reflecting Snowflake's commitment to employee wellbeing.

  • Remote and Flexible Work

    Opportunity for flexibility in work location and arrangements. Snowflake supports distributed teams with collaboration tools and resources.

Process

Interview steps.

  1. 01

    Initial Screening

    Phone or video call with Snowflake recruiter to discuss your background, management experience, and motivation for the Snowpark role. Alignment check on company values and work style.

  2. 02

    Technical Leadership Interview

    Conversation with engineering leadership focused on your experience building distributed systems at scale. Discussion of your approach to architecture decisions, technical leadership philosophy, and handling complex engineering challenges.

  3. 03

    System Design Deep Dive

    Technical interview exploring your ability to design large-scale, cloud-native systems. You'll discuss trade-offs, scalability considerations, and architectural patterns for compute platforms similar to Snowpark.

  4. 04

    Management and Leadership Assessment

    Behavioral interview with hiring manager and/or senior leadership evaluating your management style, team development approach, and track record growing engineers. Discussion of how you handle team conflicts, hiring, and performance management.

  5. 05

    Cross-Functional Collaboration

    Meeting with stakeholders from product, infrastructure, and customer-facing teams to assess your ability to influence across organizational boundaries and work effectively with diverse perspectives.

  6. 06

    Executive Leadership Round

    Optional final conversation with VP or director-level executive to discuss strategic vision, long-term roadmap thinking, and cultural alignment with Snowflake's mission around the data cloud and AI-native enterprise.

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.

Snowflake is on a mission to mobilize the world's data by changing the old-world paradigm of “bring data to compute” to “bring compute to the data”. Our innovative built-for-the-cloud architecture revolutionized the data warehousing industry with the flexibility of big data platforms and the elasticity of the cloud at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions. Our products enable thousands of enterprises to unlock the value of their data with near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance.

We are looking for a talented, passionate Software Engineering Manager for our Snowpark product to build our elastic, high-scale, high-performance, cloud-native compute platform that makes bringing compute to data effortless and simple. Our mission is to make Snowflake the preferred platform to run all AI, ML, Data Science, and Data Engineering workloads. We are building the next generation of compute platforms to open up Snowflake’s doors to limitless opportunities of discovering structure and unstructured data at scale. You will be part of a highly productive, fast-moving, and growing team that is critical to realizing Snowflake’s Data Cloud Mission. This team innovates on behalf of our customers to build a fully managed compute platform that enables our customers to leverage their data to solve business problems without needing to manage required compute infrastructure.

AS A SOFTWARE ENGINEERING MANAGER FOR SNOWPARK, YOU WILL:

  • Provide technical and strategic direction leadership to define and build a full ecosystem of technologies, technical roadmap, and vision.

  • Plan, lead, and execute complex technical projects through your team that interact with a wide variety of teams within the company.

  • Anticipate future trends and evolving customer needs accurately and drive strategies appropriately.

  • Influence leadership on technical direction and product/team investment/pivot needs.

  • Create tools/processes/solutions that improve team productivity and efficiency.

  • Identify and lead improvements to product stability and reliability, on-call and service health, customer support, diagnosability, and manageability of the product.

  • Identify and fill skill and expertise gaps in the team.

  • Mentor and guide engineers, growing strong technical expertise within the team.

OUR IDEAL SOFTWARE ENGINEERING MANAGER WILL HAVE:

  • 8+ years of industry experience designing and building large-scale distributed systems platforms that accelerate product innovation.

  • 2+ years of full-time Software Engineering Management experience.

  • Strong passion for making developers highly productive and enabling them to be successful and grow in their career.

  • Experience with cloud-native architectures and serverless compute platforms (e.g., AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Cloud Run functions, etc).

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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