# Senior Software Engineer - Cloud Provisioning Service
**Company:** [Snowflake](https://scaleengineer.com/companies/snowflake)
Senior Distributed Systems Engineer role at Snowflake's Cloud Provisioning team, responsible for designing and implementing scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems that serve as the core abstraction layer across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. This position requires 7+ years of large-scale systems experience and 2+ years of technical leadership, with deep expertise in systems programming, cloud infrastructure, and high-availability architectures that power thousands of customer deployments.
**Role:** Senior Software Engineer
**Seniority:** Senior
**Locations:** US-WA-Bellevue
**Salary:** 200000–287500 USD
[Apply](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/snowflake/b421f848-3529-4123-b833-5566c0aa9017)
Canonical: https://scaleengineer.com/jobs/snowflake/senior-software-engineer-cloud-provisioning-service-b421f848
---
## Responsibilities

- Design and Implement Scalable Distributed Systems: Architect and build fault-tolerant, high-performance distributed services that abstract cloud provider differences across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud while meeting Snowflake's unique performance and cost optimization requirements
- Solve Large-Scale Systems Challenges: Apply advanced software engineering and analytical problem-solving skills to address critical scalability, performance, and reliability issues impacting thousands of customer deployments across multi-cloud infrastructure
- Optimize Fault Tolerance and High Availability: Analyze and resolve fault tolerance mechanisms, high availability architectures, and performance scale challenges through rigorous testing, monitoring, and iterative optimization of distributed systems components
- Lead Cross-Functional Technical Initiatives: Own end-to-end delivery of complex architectural initiatives requiring collaboration with engineers, product managers, and technical program managers; define technical direction and drive consensus across teams
- Engineer Consistency-Durability-Cost Trade-offs: Evaluate and implement strategic trade-offs between data consistency guarantees, durability commitments, and infrastructure costs to build solutions meeting rapidly evolving service requirements
- Ensure Operational Excellence and Customer Commitments: Maintain operational readiness of cloud provisioning services, establish monitoring and alerting frameworks, and consistently meet SLA commitments regarding availability and performance for enterprise customers
- Mentor and Scale Engineering Teams: Provide technical guidance, mentorship, and career development to junior and senior engineers; establish best practices for distributed systems implementation and operational procedures
- Collaborate on Cloud Provider Abstraction: Contribute to the design and refinement of the abstraction layer between cloud providers and Snowflake's core services, balancing usability, cognitive load, performance, and cost efficiency

## Requirements

### education

- {"name":"Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science","description":"BS in Computer Science or related field providing foundational knowledge in algorithms, data structures, and computer architecture"}
- {"name":"Advanced Degree (Preferred)","description":"Master's or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related discipline demonstrating advanced theoretical and research contributions to the field"}

### technical

- {"name":"Large-Scale Distributed Systems","description":"Proven experience designing, building, and operating fault-tolerant distributed systems handling millions of concurrent operations in production environments"}
- {"name":"Systems Programming Expertise","description":"Professional proficiency in C++ or Java with demonstrated mastery of multi-threading, concurrency, memory management, and low-level performance optimization"}
- {"name":"Cloud Infrastructure Knowledge","description":"Production experience with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud including deep understanding of compute, storage, networking services and cross-cloud abstractions"}
- {"name":"Operating Systems Concepts","description":"Advanced knowledge of kernel-level concepts: process scheduling, memory hierarchies, I/O systems, network stacks, file systems, and performance analysis"}
- {"name":"Distributed Systems Theory","description":"Strong understanding of consistency models, consensus algorithms, fault tolerance strategies, CAP theorem trade-offs, and scalability patterns"}
- {"name":"Control Plane & Service Layer Architecture","description":"Experience architecting distributed control planes with compute, storage, and networking configuration management across multiple infrastructure domains"}

### experience

- {"name":"7+ Years Industry Experience","description":"Seven or more years designing, implementing, and supporting large-scale production systems at enterprise or cloud-scale organizations"}
- {"name":"2+ Years Technical Leadership","description":"Minimum two years leading engineering teams with responsibility for mentoring junior and senior engineers, architectural decisions, and team scaling"}
- {"name":"Large-Scale Systems Production Support","description":"Extensive hands-on experience troubleshooting, optimizing, and maintaining high-availability distributed systems serving thousands of concurrent customers"}
- {"name":"Cross-Functional Collaboration","description":"Track record of successfully collaborating across product, infrastructure, and technical program management teams on complex platform initiatives"}
- {"name":"Problem-Solving at Scale","description":"Demonstrated ability to identify creative solutions to challenging distributed systems problems including performance, consistency, durability, and cost optimization"}

## Skills

### required

- {"name":"Distributed Systems Architecture","description":"Design and implementation of large-scale, fault-tolerant distributed systems with multi-service orchestration, consensus mechanisms, and replica management at scale"}
- {"name":"Systems Programming (C++ or Java)","description":"Professional proficiency in systems-level programming with expertise in multi-threading, concurrency primitives, memory management, and performance optimization"}
- {"name":"Cloud Infrastructure Platforms","description":"Hands-on production experience with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud including resource provisioning, networking, compute configuration, and infrastructure automation"}
- {"name":"Operating Systems Fundamentals","description":"Deep understanding of kernel concepts including multi-threading, memory management, I/O systems, networking protocols, storage architectures, and performance tuning"}
- {"name":"Technical Leadership","description":"Demonstrated ability to lead, mentor, and scale engineering teams; experience guiding architectural decisions and cross-functional initiative ownership"}
- {"name":"Computer Science Fundamentals","description":"Strong foundation in data structures, algorithms, complexity analysis, and distributed systems theory including consensus, fault tolerance, and consistency models"}
- {"name":"High-Availability & Fault Tolerance","description":"Expertise in designing systems for operational resilience, data durability guarantees, recovery mechanisms, and SLA-driven performance engineering"}
- {"name":"Control Plane Architecture","description":"Experience building distributed control planes and services layers managing compute, storage, and networking configuration at enterprise scale"}

### preferred

- {"name":"Kubernetes or Container Orchestration","description":"Experience with containerization platforms and distributed orchestration systems for managing complex multi-cloud workloads"}
- {"name":"Database Systems Design","description":"Understanding of distributed database internals including query optimization, transaction processing, replication, and storage engine design"}
- {"name":"Microservices Architecture","description":"Experience designing, implementing, and operating microservices-based platforms with service mesh, API gateways, and distributed tracing"}
- {"name":"Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC)","description":"Proficiency with declarative infrastructure automation using tools like Terraform, Helm, or CloudFormation for multi-cloud deployments"}
- {"name":"Observability & Monitoring","description":"Experience designing comprehensive monitoring, logging, and distributed tracing systems for troubleshooting complex distributed systems"}
- {"name":"Performance Profiling & Optimization","description":"Advanced skills in identifying performance bottlenecks through benchmarking, profiling, and implementing optimizations in systems software"}
- {"name":"Go or Rust Programming","description":"Experience with modern systems programming languages offering memory safety and concurrency guarantees for cloud infrastructure tools"}
- {"name":"SaaS Platform Experience","description":"Background building or operating enterprise SaaS platforms serving thousands of customers with strict uptime and performance requirements"}

## Tech stack

### tools

- {"name":"Kubernetes","description":"Container orchestration platform for managing distributed deployments, service scheduling, and auto-scaling across multi-cloud infrastructure"}
- {"name":"Terraform / CloudFormation","description":"Infrastructure-as-Code tools for declarative infrastructure provisioning and management across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud platforms"}
- {"name":"Docker","description":"Container runtime and packaging technology for consistent deployment of distributed services across cloud environments"}
- {"name":"Jenkins / GitLab CI","description":"Continuous integration and deployment platforms for automated testing, building, and releasing distributed systems components"}
- {"name":"Prometheus / Grafana","description":"Monitoring and observability stack for metrics collection, visualization, and alerting on distributed systems performance and health"}
- {"name":"ELK Stack / Splunk","description":"Centralized logging and log analysis platforms for troubleshooting and understanding behavior of large-scale distributed systems"}
- {"name":"Jaeger / Zipkin","description":"Distributed tracing systems for understanding request flows and performance bottlenecks across multi-service architectures"}
- {"name":"PagerDuty / Opsgenie","description":"Incident management and on-call platforms ensuring rapid response to operational issues in mission-critical cloud infrastructure"}

### others

- {"name":"Amazon Web Services (AWS)","description":"Primary cloud platform providing compute (EC2), networking (VPC), storage (S3, EBS), and managed services that form infrastructure abstractions for Snowflake"}
- {"name":"Microsoft Azure","description":"Enterprise cloud platform with compute, networking, and storage services requiring deep integration and optimization within Snowflake's multi-cloud strategy"}
- {"name":"Google Cloud Platform (GCP)","description":"Third cloud provider offering Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, and networking services requiring standardized abstraction across provider APIs"}
- {"name":"Linux / Unix Systems","description":"Deep understanding of Linux kernel, system calls, process management, and Unix networking required for building infrastructure-level distributed systems"}
- {"name":"Distributed Systems Patterns","description":"Design patterns including service mesh, circuit breakers, bulkheads, eventual consistency, and eventual healing for building resilient distributed platforms"}
- {"name":"Multi-Region Architecture","description":"Experience designing systems operating across geographic regions with data consistency, disaster recovery, and cross-region failover considerations"}

### databases

- {"name":"Snowflake Data Cloud","description":"Core product platform providing data warehousing, analytics, and multi-cloud data sharing capabilities that infrastructure engineers must deeply understand"}
- {"name":"Distributed Databases (Etcd, Consul)","description":"Strongly consistent distributed databases used for configuration management, service discovery, and distributed consensus in cloud provisioning control planes"}
- {"name":"PostgreSQL / MySQL","description":"Relational databases potentially used for operational metadata, configuration storage, and monitoring backend services within the provisioning platform"}
- {"name":"Apache Kafka","description":"Distributed event streaming platform for reliable, scalable message processing and event-driven architectures in large-scale infrastructure systems"}

### languages

- {"name":"Java","description":"Primary language for systems development at Snowflake, used extensively for building distributed services, high-availability platforms, and enterprise SaaS components with strong ecosystem for concurrency and performance optimization"}
- {"name":"C++","description":"Systems programming language for performance-critical components, low-level infrastructure code, and scenarios requiring fine-grained control over memory management and multi-threaded execution"}
- {"name":"Python","description":"Used for infrastructure automation, control plane scripting, testing frameworks, and operational tools across the cloud provisioning platform"}
- {"name":"SQL","description":"Essential for query optimization, data platform understanding, and working with Snowflake's core data warehousing capabilities"}

### frameworks

- {"name":"Spring Framework / Spring Boot","description":"Enterprise Java framework commonly used at Snowflake for building microservices, REST APIs, and application infrastructure with dependency injection and operational features"}
- {"name":"gRPC","description":"High-performance RPC framework for distributed service communication, supporting efficient inter-service communication patterns in cloud provisioning layers"}
- {"name":"Netty","description":"Asynchronous event-driven networking framework used for building scalable, non-blocking network applications and low-latency infrastructure services"}
- {"name":"Akka","description":"Actor-based concurrency framework supporting distributed, resilient systems with location transparency and fault tolerance mechanisms"}

## Benefits

### benefits

## Compensation

- **max:** 280000
- **min:** 200000
- **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.

There is only one Data Cloud. Snowflake's founders started from scratch and designed a data platform built for the cloud that is effective, affordable, and accessible to all data users. But it didn't stop there. They engineered Snowflake to power the Data Cloud, where thousands of organizations unlock the value of their data with near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance. This is our vision: a world with endless insights to tackle the challenges and opportunities of today and reveal the possibilities of tomorrow.

Our product offering runs on multiple cloud providers including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Our infrastructure self-optimizes, provides high availability and data protection across cloud providers so our users can focus on using their data, not managing it.

Our team is called the Cloud Provisioning team, the core underpinning of what makes Snowflake work across multiple cloud providers. We are creating an abstraction layer between each of our cloud providers and the rest of Snowflake that is optimized for Snowflake's unique needs. We balance usability, cognitive load, performance, and cost for the rest of Snowflake.

We are actively hiring talented distributed systems developers. This role is a unique opportunity to make a significant impact in shaping the vision, architecture and approach for the core services that the rest of Snowflake operates on.

**As a Senior Distributed Systems Engineer at Snowflake you will:**

* Solve real business needs at large scale by applying your software engineering and analytical problem solving skills.
* Design and implement scalable distributed systems for our services layer.
* Analyze fault-tolerance and high availability issues, performance and scale challenges, and solve them.
* Lead cross-functional initiatives, and collaborate with engineers, product managers and Technical Program Managers across teams.
* Understand trade-offs between consistency, durability and costs to build solutions which can meet the demands of rapidly growing services.
* Ensure operational readiness of the services and meet the commitments to our customers regarding availability and performance.

**Our ideal Distributed Systems Engineer will have:**

* 7+ years industry experience designing, building and supporting large scale systems in production.
* 2+ years experience in leading a group of junior and senior engineers.
* Experience building large scale distributed fault tolerant services and control planes including components of compute, storage and networking configuration and monitoring.
* Excellent understanding of low level operating systems concepts including multi-threading, memory management, networking and storage, performance and scale.
* Strong CS fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems.
* Systems programming skills including multi-threading, concurrency, etc. Fluency in C++ or Java preferred.
* Track record of identifying and implementing creative solutions.
* Experience with cloud infrastructure: AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.
* BS in Computer Science; Masters or PhD preferred.

**Why join the Engineering team at Snowflake?**

* Build an industry-leading Cloud Data Platform.
* Solve challenging technical problems related to security, parallel and distributed systems, programming, resource management, large-scale system maintenance, and more!
* Work closely with our customers & partners, understand their use cases & needs, think strategically to seek the right problem to solve at the right time, and innovate with rigor.
* Learn about and contribute to:

  * Super-robust and secure enterprise SaaS platform that services thousands of customers and hundreds of millions of complex queries daily.
  * Highly-scalable and reliable cloud platform that runs on hundreds and thousands of machines.
  * Optimizing performance and resource management in Java systems.
* Join a world-class team of both industry veterans and rising stars.

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.

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)