Scale Engineer

Senior Engineering Manager - OLTP

Engineering Manager · Senior · Full Time

US-CA-Menlo ParkUSD 264k – 380k6d ago
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Role

What you'll do.

Lead the design, architecture, and scaling of Snowflake's next-generation OLTP database platform. As Senior Engineering Manager, you'll oversee multiple engineering teams building mission-critical transactional technology that combines Snowflake's renowned simplicity with enterprise-grade performance and reliability for the Data Cloud.

Responsibilities

  • OLTP Platform Architecture & Strategy: Define and communicate the technical vision, architecture roadmap, and execution strategy for Snowflake's OLTP database platform. Translate product objectives and customer requirements into comprehensive system designs covering transactions, concurrency control, query optimization, storage engines, replication, recovery, and scalability. Make critical technical trade-off decisions across consistency models, latency targets, throughput capacity, availability guarantees, cost efficiency, and security posture.
  • Engineering Team Leadership & Organization Scaling: Lead, mentor, and develop multiple engineering teams and engineering managers working on core database systems, cloud infrastructure, and platform reliability. Build a high-performing organization through recruitment of exceptional technical talent, performance management, career development, and fostering a culture emphasizing ownership, technical excellence, and relentless execution. Scale the organization to meet growing complexity and ambition of the platform roadmap.
  • Technical Decision Making & Design Leadership: Drive critical architectural and technical decisions across all major database system components: transaction management systems, concurrency control protocols, storage and indexing strategies, data compaction algorithms, crash recovery mechanisms, replication topologies, and scalability approaches. Ensure technical decisions align with customer requirements, regulatory standards, and Snowflake's quality bar for simplicity and operational excellence.
  • AI-Powered Engineering Excellence: Champion the adoption of AI and agentic development practices across the engineering organization to enhance productivity, accelerate delivery velocity, and improve code quality. Drive experimentation with emerging AI capabilities, share learnings, and establish best practices that allow engineers to focus on high-value architectural and design work while leveraging AI for routine tasks.
  • Operational Reliability & Production Excellence: Ensure the OLTP platform meets stringent operational standards including data durability guarantees, high availability targets, performance SLOs, security compliance, and incident response protocols. Establish comprehensive observability and monitoring systems, implement automation to reduce operational burden, drive blameless incident postmortems, and continuously improve platform reliability.
  • Major Initiative Leadership & Execution: Own complex, multi-quarter engineering initiatives from early design phases through implementation, integration, launch, and production operations. Establish clear milestones, track execution against plans, remove organizational obstacles, manage dependencies, and ensure smooth transitions through product lifecycle stages while maintaining quality standards.
  • Cross-Functional Partnership & Alignment: Collaborate closely with Product Management, Customer Success, Sales Engineering, and executive leadership to understand customer needs, prioritize platform capabilities, align technical roadmaps with business objectives, plan resource allocation, and coordinate execution across organizational boundaries. Communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and drive consensus on key technical decisions.
  • Talent Acquisition & Development: Lead recruiting efforts to attract world-class database engineers, infrastructure engineers, and technical leaders. Conduct technical interviews, evaluate architectural thinking, assess system design capabilities, and build inclusive teams with diverse backgrounds and perspectives. Create development opportunities and clear career paths for team members to grow into larger technical and leadership roles.

Qualifications

What we look for.

Technical

  • Database Engine Architecture

    Mastery of core OLTP database components: query parsing and optimization, transaction coordination, concurrency control (pessimistic and optimistic locking), consistency enforcement (ACID properties), storage management, indexing strategies (B-trees, hash indexes), compaction mechanisms, and performance profiling.

  • Distributed Systems Design

    Deep expertise in consensus algorithms, replication topologies, partition tolerance, fault tolerance mechanisms, recovery protocols, data consistency models, and orchestration of distributed database workloads across cloud infrastructure.

  • Cloud-Scale Operations

    Production experience deploying and operating database systems on major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) with expertise in containerization, orchestration, monitoring, logging, alerting, auto-scaling, multi-region architectures, and disaster recovery.

  • Programming & System Design

    Strong hands-on coding ability to navigate complex database codebases, understand low-level system implementation, and drive detailed technical design reviews. Ability to dive deep into performance debugging and optimization.

  • Modern Development Practices

    Fluency with AI-assisted development tools and practices, agentic automation frameworks, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, test automation, and metrics-driven development approaches.

Education

  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or Related Field

    BS or MS in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent disciplinary foundation covering algorithms, data structures, systems, and distributed computing concepts.

  • Equivalent Professional Experience

    Advanced professionals with 15+ years in database systems engineering or distributed systems may substitute formal degree with demonstrated mastery through significant career accomplishments and technical contributions.

Experience

  • Database Systems Engineering

    Minimum 10 years of professional experience in database internals, OLTP system design, distributed storage systems, or related database platform engineering. Should include shipping production database features and optimizing performance at scale.

  • Engineering Management & Leadership

    Minimum 8 years leading engineering teams at scale, including direct management of multiple teams and engineering managers. Experience hiring, developing, and retaining senior technical talent and building high-performing organizations.

  • Mission-Critical Systems Operations

    Proven track record operating and improving systems with stringent requirements for availability (99.99%+ uptime), durability (zero data loss), latency (sub-millisecond response times), and security at production scale.

  • Strategic Technology Leadership

    Experience defining technical strategy, building technology roadmaps, making architecture decisions with significant business impact, and successfully executing multi-year platform initiatives from conception through production deployment.

Skills

Required

  • Database Internals & OLTP Systems

    10+ years of hands-on experience with database engine design, OLTP system architecture, or distributed storage systems. Deep technical knowledge of transaction management, concurrency control mechanisms, consistency models, and performance optimization in database systems.

  • Engineering Team Leadership

    8+ years leading engineering teams including multiple teams and engineering managers. Demonstrated expertise in organizational scaling, talent development, performance management, and building high-performing technical organizations.

  • Distributed Systems & Database Core Technologies

    Expert-level understanding of transactions, ACID properties, concurrency control algorithms, consistency protocols (eventual, strong, causal), data replication strategies, recovery mechanisms, storage engines, and database performance tuning.

  • Cloud Infrastructure & Highly Available Systems

    Significant production experience operating mission-critical systems on AWS, Azure, and/or GCP. Deep knowledge of high availability patterns, disaster recovery, cloud-native architecture, scalability, and observability in distributed cloud environments.

  • Strategic Technical Leadership

    Ability to translate complex product requirements into comprehensive technical architecture, roadmaps, and execution plans. Experience making critical trade-offs across consistency, latency, throughput, availability, scalability, durability, security, and cost.

  • AI-Assisted Development & Agentic Systems

    Strong understanding of AI-native development practices, agentic software development paradigms, and their application across engineering lifecycles. Demonstrated ability to drive adoption of AI tools to improve engineering velocity, code quality, and team productivity.

  • Cross-Functional Collaboration & Influence

    Proven ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly, drive alignment across organizational boundaries, and influence stakeholders including Product, Engineering, and executive leadership in fast-moving environments.

Preferred

  • PostgreSQL & Open-Source Database Internals

    Nice to have

    Hands-on experience with PostgreSQL architecture, codebase navigation, or contributions to other open-source database systems. Understanding of MVCC, WAL recovery, query optimization, and extension mechanisms.

  • Data Warehouse Platform Experience

    Nice to have

    Prior experience building or managing data warehouse systems, MPP architectures, or analytical database platforms. Understanding of the intersection between OLTP and OLAP workloads.

  • Operational Reliability & SRE Practices

    Nice to have

    Deep expertise in operational safety, incident response protocols, observability frameworks, automation, and reliability engineering for mission-critical services. Experience implementing SLOs and building resilient systems.

  • Large-Scale System Architecture

    Nice to have

    Experience designing and operating systems serving millions of concurrent connections, exabyte-scale data volumes, or handling extreme performance and durability requirements.

Compensation

Pay and benefits.

Base·USD 264,000 – 379,500

Equity·Stock options

Benefits

  • Equity & Stock Options

    Competitive equity grants with vesting schedules aligned with long-term value creation. Participation in Snowflake's growth as a public company with options to build significant wealth alongside base and bonus compensation.

  • Performance Bonus

    Annual performance-based bonus tied to organizational and individual achievement metrics. Typical bonus targets for Senior Engineering Manager level range from 20-30% of base salary based on goal attainment.

  • Comprehensive Health & Wellness

    Medical, dental, and vision insurance plans with competitive premiums and coverage. Employee assistance programs, mental health support, wellness initiatives, and fitness reimbursement to support physical and mental wellbeing.

  • Retirement & Financial Planning

    401(k) matching program with employer contributions up to 6% of salary. Access to financial planning services and investment advisory resources to optimize retirement planning.

  • Flexible Work Arrangements

    Remote-first or flexible hybrid work options depending on role and location. Ability to work across Snowflake offices and remote locations to enable work-life balance and access to diverse talent pools.

  • Professional Development

    Learning and development budget for conferences, certifications, courses, and books. Access to Snowflake's technical training programs, coaching, and leadership development initiatives for continuous skill advancement.

  • Generous Time Off

    Unlimited PTO policy encouraging work-life balance and personal wellbeing. Additional paid parental leave, sabbatical options, and paid holidays to support employee needs and life milestones.

  • Commuter & Relocation Support

    Pre-tax commuter benefits for public transportation. Relocation assistance packages for candidates relocating to office locations including temporary housing and moving expense reimbursement.

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 expanding the boundaries of the Data Cloud to support mission-critical transactional workloads. Our goal is to deliver OLTP capabilities with the performance, reliability, simplicity, and scale customers expect from Snowflake, while creating a seamless experience across transactional and analytical data.

We are looking for a Senior Engineering Manager – OLTP to lead engineering teams and leaders building core transactional database technology and the cloud infrastructure required to operate it at scale. You will help define the architecture and roadmap, grow the organization, and drive technology from design through production.

AS A SENIOR ENGINEERING MANAGER – OLTP AT SNOWFLAKE, YOU WILL:

  • Set technical and execution strategy for key areas of Snowflake's OLTP platform, translating product goals into architecture, roadmaps, and team plans.

  • Lead and grow multiple engineering teams, developing managers and senior technical leaders while fostering a culture of ownership, technical excellence, and execution.

  • Drive adoption of AI and agentic development practices to improve engineering velocity, quality, and productivity across the software development lifecycle.

  • Drive architecture and technical decisions in areas such as transactions, concurrency control, low-latency query processing, storage, indexing, compaction, recovery, replication, and scalability.

  • Ensure operational readiness and reliability of mission-critical database services, meeting customer commitments for durability, availability, performance, and security through automation, observability, and operational safety.

  • Drive trade-offs across consistency, latency, throughput, availability, scalability, durability, security, and cost.

  • Lead major initiatives from design through implementation, launch, and production operation.

  • Partner with Engineering, Product, and cross-functional leaders to define priorities, align roadmaps, plan staffing, and coordinate execution across organizational boundaries.

  • Recruit exceptional engineers and engineering leaders, and develop existing team members into larger technical and leadership roles.

OUR IDEAL CANDIDATE WILL HAVE:

  • 10+ years experience in database internals, OLTP databases, or distributed storage systems.

  • 8+ years leading engineering teams, including multiple teams and managers.

  • Deep experience with transactions, concurrency, consistency, replication, recovery, storage, and database performance.

  • Strong understanding of AI-assisted and agentic software development and its application across the engineering lifecycle.

  • Experience operating mission-critical systems with high standards for availability, durability, observability, operational safety, and incident response.

  • Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to drive alignment and influence across organizational boundaries.

  • Strong hands-on technical ability, including navigating complex codebases and diving deep into system design and implementation.

  • Experience with OLTP database internals or Postgres internals.

  • Significant cloud experience across AWS, Azure, and/or GCP, including highly available services.

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

WHY JOIN THE OLTP ENGINEERING TEAM AT SNOWFLAKE?

This is an opportunity to help define the next generation of Snowflake's OLTP database platform and expand the workloads customers can bring to the Data Cloud.

You will work on some of the hardest problems in database systems - transactions, concurrency, latency, storage, distributed systems, reliability, and cloud-scale operations - while building and developing the engineering organization needed to solve them.

You will work alongside industry veterans and emerging leaders to create database technology that combines the simplicity and operational experience Snowflake customers expect with the performance and reliability required by mission-critical transactional applications.

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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