Scale Engineer

Senior Software Engineer - Cloud Security

Senior Software Engineer · Senior · Full Time

US-CA-Menlo ParkUSD 200k – 288k1d ago
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Role

What you'll do.

Senior Software Engineer - Cloud Security at Snowflake focuses on building scalable, software-defined security controls across 600+ million assets on AWS, Azure, and GCP. You'll design and operate AI-augmented security pipelines for threat detection, posture management, and risk scoring while mentoring peers and raising engineering standards through best practices in testing, monitoring, and observability. This role requires 5+ years of software engineering experience with strong expertise in secure architecture, distributed systems, and cloud security automation across multi-cloud environments.

Responsibilities

  • Design and Build Multi-Cloud Security Solutions: Architect and implement software-defined security controls across 600+ million assets spanning three major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP). Create comprehensive solutions for identity and access management (IAM), detection and monitoring systems, configuration management, and data protection that scale across heterogeneous cloud environments.
  • Automate Security Controls and Compliance: Engineer automated security control systems that eliminate manual, one-off security fixes. Implement continuous compliance automation and policy enforcement mechanisms across cloud platforms, establishing baseline standards and controls that operate at scale.
  • Build Real-Time Security Monitoring and Alerting: Develop and maintain real-time security monitoring, logging, and alerting systems leveraging Snowflake's data platform technologies. Create telemetry ingestion pipelines that process hundreds of millions of asset events to enable rapid detection and response to security incidents.
  • Design AI-Augmented Posture Management Pipelines: Architect continuous data pipelines that ingest security posture and telemetry data, apply machine learning models for risk scoring and anomaly detection, and automatically surface high-impact security issues. Enable AI-driven decision making to process signals at scales that exceed human analytical capability.
  • Own End-to-End Security Workstreams: Take full ownership of security initiatives from design through deployment, conducting technical design reviews, providing architectural guidance, and defining implementation standards. Drive impact across project lifecycle while owning quality outcomes and technical debt management.
  • Mentor and Raise Engineering Standards: Elevate the engineering bar across the Cloud Security team through mentorship, code reviews, and technical guidance. Establish and enforce software engineering best practices including comprehensive documentation, robust testing frameworks, and production observability standards.
  • Apply Software Engineering Best Practices to Security: Champion security-as-code principles by ensuring all security controls are testable, monitorable, and analytically tractable. Implement rigorous testing strategies, logging/observability for controls, and documentation standards that transform security from ad-hoc operations into engineered, reliable systems.
  • Develop Security Policy and Baseline Standards: Define, document, and maintain security baselines, policies, and standards for public cloud platforms. Create prescriptive frameworks that guide secure-by-default configurations while balancing developer autonomy with security requirements.

Qualifications

What we look for.

Technical

  • Multi-Cloud Architecture Knowledge

    Deep hands-on experience designing, building, and operating systems across multiple cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) with understanding of cloud-specific security primitives, networking, and service models across different cloud ecosystems.

  • Secure System Design and Architecture

    Proven expertise designing large-scale secure systems with comprehensive knowledge of secure architecture principles, threat modeling methodologies, cryptographic concepts, and security design patterns applicable to cloud-native architectures.

  • Distributed Systems and APIs

    Strong foundation in distributed architecture principles with hands-on experience building scalable APIs using modern protocols like gRPC and REST. Experience designing for high availability, fault tolerance, and consistency across distributed components.

  • Programming Language Proficiency

    Production-level expertise in one or more systems/backend languages such as Java, C++, Go, or Python. Ability to write performant, maintainable code that follows security best practices and design patterns.

  • Cloud Security Fundamentals

    Comprehensive understanding of cloud security domains including IAM policies and provisioning, security monitoring and detection systems, configuration management and compliance, and data protection mechanisms across multi-tenant cloud environments.

  • Data Pipeline Architecture

    Experience designing and building scalable data ingestion and processing pipelines capable of handling hundreds of millions of events. Knowledge of stream processing, batch processing, and real-time analytics frameworks.

Education

  • Computer Science or Related Field

    Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or equivalent field providing strong foundational computer science principles. Advanced degrees are a plus but not required with equivalent professional experience.

  • Security or Cloud Certifications (Optional)

    AWS Certified Solutions Architect, GCP Professional Cloud Architect, Azure Solutions Architect, or security-focused certifications (CISSP, CEH) are valued but not required. Professional certifications can demonstrate commitment to cloud and security domains.

Experience

  • Senior Software Engineering Background

    Minimum 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building production systems at scale. Track record of designing and owning complex systems from inception through deployment, maintenance, and optimization.

  • Large-Scale Systems Ownership

    Demonstrated experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems serving millions of users or processing massive data volumes. Evidence of taking end-to-end ownership of system reliability, performance, and security.

  • Cloud Security or Infrastructure Engineering

    Professional experience in cloud security, DevSecOps, or cloud infrastructure engineering roles. Familiarity with practical security challenges in production cloud environments and hands-on experience with security tooling and automation.

  • Cross-Functional Technical Leadership

    Demonstrated ability to collaborate effectively with security, platform, and engineering teams while influencing architecture and standards. Experience communicating complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Skills

Required

  • Java Programming

    Production-level Java expertise with deep understanding of JVM internals, concurrent programming, memory management, and designing high-performance distributed systems.

  • Go Programming

    Proficiency writing production Go code optimized for cloud-native applications, microservices, and tools. Strong understanding of goroutines, channels, and Go's concurrency model.

  • Python Programming

    Advanced Python skills for backend systems, data processing, and scripting. Experience with modern Python frameworks and best practices for production environments.

  • C++ Programming

    Systems-level C++ expertise for performance-critical components. Understanding of memory management, concurrency, and writing efficient, maintainable C++ code.

  • Cloud Platform Architecture

    Comprehensive knowledge of AWS, Azure, and GCP services including compute, networking, storage, identity and access management, and security-focused services.

  • Threat Modeling and Secure Design

    Ability to identify security threats, model attack surfaces, and design systems with security controls embedded at the architectural level rather than as afterthoughts.

  • API Design and Implementation

    Expertise designing and implementing REST APIs and gRPC services that are secure, scalable, and maintainable. Understanding of protocol-level security and API authentication/authorization patterns.

  • System Design and Scalability

    Strong foundation in distributed system design principles, capacity planning, horizontal scalability, and designing systems that maintain performance and security under high load.

  • Security Operations and Monitoring

    Hands-on experience building and operating security monitoring systems, logging infrastructure, and alerting mechanisms. Understanding of SIEM concepts, security telemetry, and incident response workflows.

  • Cloud Security Best Practices

    Deep understanding of cloud security primitives, defense-in-depth strategies, least privilege principles, and secure configuration management specific to multi-cloud environments.

Preferred

  • Machine Learning and AI for Security

    Nice to have

    Experience applying machine learning techniques to security problems including anomaly detection, risk scoring, threat prioritization, and behavioral analysis. Knowledge of building data pipelines that feed ML models for security operations.

  • SQL and Data Query Optimization

    Nice to have

    Advanced SQL proficiency with ability to write, debug, and optimize complex queries for data-driven security analysis. Experience optimizing query performance on large datasets for real-time and batch analytics.

  • Kubernetes and Container Orchestration

    Nice to have

    Hands-on Kubernetes expertise including cluster architecture, networking policies, security contexts, RBAC, and designing resilient containerized applications. Experience with production Kubernetes deployments.

  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

    Nice to have

    Strong proficiency with Terraform and/or Pulumi for infrastructure automation. Experience managing cloud resources, compliance as code, and GitOps workflows for secure infrastructure deployment.

  • Algorithms and Data Structures

    Nice to have

    Deep algorithmic thinking applied to security and scalability problems. Ability to analyze computational complexity, select appropriate data structures, and optimize for both correctness and performance.

  • High-Concurrency System Design

    Nice to have

    Proven experience designing and operating resilient, concurrent services optimized for multi-cloud environments with millions of concurrent requests. Understanding of distributed consensus, eventual consistency, and resilience patterns.

  • Snowflake Platform Expertise

    Nice to have

    Familiarity with Snowflake's data platform, including architecture, query optimization, and using Snowflake as a technology stack for building security solutions and analytics.

  • DevSecOps and Automation

    Nice to have

    Experience building CI/CD pipelines with security scanning, automated compliance checking, and shift-left security practices. Knowledge of secure software development lifecycle (SSDLC) principles.

Compensation

Pay and benefits.

Base·USD 200,000 – 287,500

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.

We are hiring a Senior Software Engineer for our Cloud Security team. This team reduces risk to Snowflake at scale through software-defined controls rather than one-off fixes, building the platforms and pipelines that make entire classes of problems go away. You won't just find problems; you'll ship the systems that improve and verify the security posture of Snowflake products across 600+ million assets and three cloud providers (AWS, Azure, and GCP), with a growing focus on using AI to reason over posture data at a scale humans can't.

AS A SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER AT SNOWFLAKE, YOU WILL:

  • Build solutions and services that operate, protect, and govern our security posture across 600+ million assets and three clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP).

  • Automate security controls across cloud environments, including core primitives: IAM, detection and monitoring, configuration management, and data protection.

  • Build real-time security monitoring, logging, and alerting, using Snowflake technologies to make Snowflake more secure.

  • Define and maintain security baselines, policies, and standards for public cloud platforms.

  • Design and operate continuous, AI-augmented pipelines that ingest posture and telemetry across hundreds of millions of assets, score risk, and automatically surface the highest-impact issues.

  • Own security workstreams end to end and raise the engineering bar through design reviews, mentorship, and technical guidance for the team.

  • Bring software engineering best practices to security work: documentation, testing, and observability, because a control you can't test, monitor, or reason about isn't a control.

OUR IDEAL SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER WILL HAVE:

  • 5+ years of software engineering experience preferred, or equivalent experience.

  • Experience designing and owning secure, large-scale systems, with working knowledge of secure architecture principles and threat modeling.

  • A passion for developer experience: making security the default rather than a restriction.

  • Experience building software in one or more languages such as Java, C++, Go, or Python.

  • Familiarity with distributed architectures and building scalable APIs (e.g., gRPC, REST).

  • Strong collaboration and communication skills across engineering and cross-functional stakeholders.

  • A commitment to data-driven, scalable decision-making that holds up over time.

BONUS POINTS FOR THE FOLLOWING:

  • Experience applying AI/ML to security problems (detection, risk scoring, prioritization) and building the data pipelines that feed them.

  • Proficiency writing, debugging, and optimizing SQL for data-driven security operations, as a supporting capability.

  • A strong grasp of algorithms and data structures applied to complex problems.

  • Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and IaC (Terraform, Pulumi).

  • Experience designing scalable, concurrent, resilient services for high-demand, multi-cloud environments.

WHY JOIN OUR CLOUD SECURITY TEAM AT SNOWFLAKE?

Our work centers on a platform that makes security easy to deploy and maintain: unifying the developer security experience, increasing developer autonomy, detecting vulnerabilities before they ship, and delivering secure-by-default solutions. A growing part of that is using AI to turn raw posture signal into prioritized action at a scale humans can't match. If you want to build the systems that make entire classes of security problems disappear, and deliver a world-class security experience for developers at Snowflake, this is the team.

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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