Staff Software Engineer — Dynamic Tables, Performance

Snowflake1 months ago

Location

US-WA-Bellevue

Type

Full Time

Salary

USD 236,000 – 339,200

Level

Staff

Role

Staff Software Engineer

Posted

May 6, 2026

Full TimeStaff

The role

Summary

Snowflake is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead performance improvements for Dynamic Tables, a critical streaming transformation engine. The ideal candidate will drive technical innovations in incremental view maintenance, optimizing data pipeline performance and scalability while collaborating across teams to advance Snowflake's data engineering strategy.

What you'll do

Performance Optimization: Lead design and implementation of performance improvements for incremental view maintenance engine, including multi-join incrementalization and novel incrementalization semantics

Technical Roadmap Development: Define roadmap for incremental view maintenance engine, identifying key performance, scalability, and correctness milestones

Cross-Team Collaboration: Collaborate across teams to co-design improvements that benefit incremental data pipelines

Technical Leadership: Mentor engineers, drive design reviews, and raise the technical bar through architectural leadership and high-quality code

Research Contribution: Contribute to research and publication roadmap, with active presence at top-tier database conferences like SIGMOD and VLDB

What we look for

Technical

Systems ExpertiseDeep expertise in query optimization, incremental/stream processing, or materialized view maintenance

Programming LanguagesProficiency in C++ or Java with systems-level performance analysis skills

Distributed SystemsExperience with cloud-scale systems, multi-tenant SaaS, petabyte-scale data, and thousands of concurrent workloads

Education

Advanced DegreeMS or PhD in Computer Science preferred, with emphasis on database systems

Experience

Industry Experience10+ years of experience building and optimizing large-scale data systems

Technical LeadershipProven ability to lead multi-engineer, cross-team technical initiatives

Skills

Required skills

Computer Science FundamentalsStrong knowledge of algorithms, data structures, and distributed systems design

Performance AnalysisExpertise in profiling, benchmarking, and regression detection

CommunicationExcellent written and verbal communication skills for presenting complex technical trade-offs

Nice to have

Database ExperienceFamiliarity with analytical DBMS like BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks

Stream ProcessingKnowledge of stream processing algorithms and CDC pipelines

Data Engineering ToolsExperience with data lake architectures and ecosystem tools like dbt, Airflow, Fivetran

Compensation & benefits

Salary

USD 236,000 – 339,200 (annual)

Stock options

Available

Benefits

Equal Opportunity Employment

Comprehensive non-discrimination policy covering all protected characteristics

Hybrid Work Arrangement

Flexible work model combining remote and in-office work

Interview process

1
Initial Screening — Review of candidate's background and alignment with role requirements
2
Technical Deep Dive — In-depth technical interviews focusing on systems design, performance optimization, and distributed computing expertise
3
Leadership Assessment — Evaluation of cross-team collaboration, mentorship, and architectural leadership capabilities