Staff Software Engineer – Engineering Systems, Continuous Integration Team
Staff Engineer · Staff · Full Time
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Role
What you'll do.
Join Snowflake's Engineering Systems team as a Staff Software Engineer to architect and lead the Continuous Integration platform powering the Data Cloud. This role combines deep distributed systems expertise with technical leadership, requiring 8+ years of experience building enterprise-grade CI infrastructure at scale while mentoring engineers and driving platform strategy across thousands of developers and millions of builds.
Responsibilities
- Architect and Own CI Platform Direction: Design and maintain the technical architecture of Snowflake's CI platform, ensuring it scales reliably to support thousands of developers, millions of builds monthly, and a rapidly expanding multi-repository codebase across multiple cloud providers
- Lead Distributed Systems Implementation: Design, implement, and evolve distributed CI services that deliver elastic scalability, high performance, and fault tolerance across heterogeneous cloud infrastructure while maintaining service reliability
- Drive Strategic Platform Evolution: Partner with product managers and engineering leadership to develop quarterly and long-term roadmaps that balance immediate customer needs with forward-looking technical innovation and emerging CI/CD technologies
- Establish Engineering Excellence Standards: Set and enforce engineering quality standards through rigorous code reviews, design reviews, and architectural guidance, ensuring CI infrastructure meets enterprise-grade reliability, security, and maintainability expectations
- Resolve Complex Technical Challenges: Identify, analyze, and resolve systemic technical challenges including build performance optimization, resource efficiency, multi-tenant isolation, security hardening, and platform reliability at scale
- Mentor and Develop Engineering Talent: Elevate technical judgment, design quality, and engineering craftsmanship across the team through hands-on mentorship, code review feedback, and architectural guidance that grows career development
- Evaluate and Adopt Emerging Technologies: Research, evaluate, and strategically adopt emerging CI/CD technologies, tooling patterns, and industry best practices to maintain Snowflake's competitive edge in developer platform innovation
- Drive Cross-Team Developer Platform Initiatives: Serve as key stakeholder and collaborator on cross-functional initiatives affecting developer productivity, coordinating with adjacent Engineering Systems teams and leadership to shape holistic developer experience
Qualifications
What we look for.
Technical
Distributed Systems Design at Scale
Proven ability to design, build, and operate distributed systems serving massive scale across thousands of nodes and millions of transactions, with deep understanding of consistency models, failure modes, and fault tolerance patterns
Enterprise-Grade CI/CD Infrastructure
Substantial hands-on experience designing, building, scaling, or significantly evolving continuous integration infrastructure supporting large engineering organizations, comparable to thousands of developers and millions of builds
Multi-Language Proficiency
Production-level fluency in Java, C++, Python, or Go with demonstrated ability to write efficient, maintainable code and select appropriate languages for specific systems challenges
Computer Science Fundamentals
Strong mastery of data structures, algorithms, distributed systems theory, concurrent programming, systems design principles, and capacity planning for infrastructure systems
Build System Knowledge
Deep technical understanding of modern build systems, compilation processes, dependency management, caching strategies, parallelization, and resource optimization techniques
Education
Bachelor's Degree or Equivalent Professional Experience
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or related field; or equivalent 8+ years of professional experience demonstrating mastery of computer science fundamentals and distributed systems
Experience
8+ Years of Distributed Systems Development
Minimum 8 years of professional experience designing and building production distributed systems, with track record of shipping systems serving massive scale and diverse use cases
Technical Leadership at Organizational Level
Demonstrated track record of owning system architecture decisions, driving major technical decisions, setting engineering standards, and raising technical bar across teams or organizations
Developer Productivity and Platform Thinking
Proven passion and experience treating developer experience as a product, with focus on making engineers faster, happier, and more productive through thoughtful infrastructure design
Strategic Decision-Making and Execution
Strong strategic mindset with ability to identify high-impact priorities, translate strategy into executable technical plans, and navigate tradeoffs between competing demands
Mentorship and Technical Influence
Track record of elevating engineers around you through code reviews, design guidance, technical mentorship, and establishing practices that improve team's technical judgment
Skills
Required
Architectural Design of Distributed Systems
Ability to design fault-tolerant, scalable architectures supporting millions of operations with careful attention to consistency, availability, and partition tolerance tradeoffs
Build System Optimization and Performance Tuning
Deep expertise in identifying and eliminating build performance bottlenecks through caching strategies, intelligent parallelization, incremental build optimization, and resource scheduling
Cloud Infrastructure Management
Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure provisioning, orchestration, and multi-cloud deployment strategies across AWS, GCP, Azure or similar platforms
API Design and Distributed Communication
Strong experience designing robust APIs, implementing reliable RPC mechanisms, handling network failures, and building resilient service-to-service communication patterns
Observability and Debugging at Scale
Proficiency with monitoring systems, metrics collection, distributed tracing, logging infrastructure, and debugging complex production systems serving massive scale
Code Review and Technical Mentorship
Ability to conduct thorough, constructive code reviews that elevate code quality and provide educational feedback that develops junior engineers' technical judgment
Technical Writing and Documentation
Strong ability to articulate complex technical tradeoffs clearly through design documents, architectural diagrams, RCAs, and technical proposals for both engineering and leadership audiences
Preferred
Data Systems and Analytics Platforms
Nice to haveExperience designing or operating distributed data systems, analytical query engines, or data warehousing infrastructure handling massive datasets and concurrent queries
Jenkins Administration and Evolution
Nice to haveHands-on experience operating, scaling, or significantly improving Jenkins infrastructure at enterprise scale with custom plugins and optimization
Bazel Build System Expertise
Nice to haveProduction experience with Bazel for managing complex monorepo builds, custom rules, caching strategies, and addressing scale challenges in large organizations
Multi-Tenant System Architecture
Nice to haveExperience designing multi-tenant systems with rigorous focus on isolation, resource fairness, performance guarantees, and security boundaries between tenants
Developer Tooling and Platform Engineering
Nice to haveBackground building and evolving developer tools, internal platforms, or infrastructure that directly impacts engineering velocity and developer experience across organizations
Technical Documentation and Planning
Nice to haveExperience authoring roadmap documents, technical design specifications, project plans, post-mortems, root cause analyses, and architectural proposals
Kubernetes and Container Orchestration
Nice to haveExperience managing containerized CI/CD workloads at scale using Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms with custom scheduling and resource management
GitOps and Infrastructure as Code
Nice to haveExperience with declarative infrastructure management, GitOps workflows, infrastructure-as-code tooling, and continuous deployment patterns
Tech stack
Languages
Frameworks
Databases
Tools
Other
Compensation
Pay and benefits.
Base·USD 236,000 – 339,200
Equity·Stock options
Benefits
Comprehensive Health Coverage
Medical, dental, and vision insurance with competitive coverage options for employees and dependents
Retirement Planning
401(k) retirement savings plan with company matching and Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP) for building long-term wealth
Generous Time Off
Flexible paid time off policy allowing employees to take time for vacation, wellness, and personal needs
Significant Equity Compensation
Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) in range of $600,000 - $1,800,000 providing substantial long-term incentive and ownership stake in Snowflake
Performance Bonus
Annual performance-based bonus representing 15% of base salary, rewarding achievement of individual and team objectives
Professional Development
Investment in continuous learning, technical certifications, and conference attendance to grow expertise and stay current with emerging technologies
Collaborative Work Environment
Access to industry-leading engineering talent from Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and other top technology companies enabling knowledge sharing and professional growth
Process
Interview steps.
- 01
Recruiter Screen
Initial conversation with Snowflake recruiter to assess background, experience with distributed systems and CI/CD infrastructure, career goals, and alignment with staff-level expectations
- 02
Hiring Manager Discussion
Deep dive with Engineering Systems leadership on technical vision, architectural thinking, experience scaling platforms, and approach to mentorship and technical leadership
- 03
Technical Architecture Interview
Comprehensive discussion of system design capabilities, focusing on distributed systems architecture, trade-off analysis, scalability considerations, and handling millions of builds at massive scale
- 04
CI/CD Infrastructure Deep Dive
Technical conversation with senior engineers on CI platform specifics, build system optimization, multi-tenant isolation strategies, performance tuning, and experience with Jenkins, Bazel, or similar platforms
- 05
Technical Leadership and Mentorship Round
Discussion of staff-level competencies including code review philosophy, approach to raising engineering standards, mentorship philosophy, and examples of elevating teams technically
- 06
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Conversation with adjacent Engineering Systems teams or product partners to assess collaboration style, ability to influence without authority, and approach to cross-team initiatives
- 07
Executive Alignment
Final discussion with Engineering Systems leadership on strategic vision, long-term platform direction, and role in shaping Snowflake's developer infrastructure strategy
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're hiring a Staff Software Engineer to help us build a world-class developer platform that fuels the Snowflake Data Cloud. As an engineer on the Continuous Integration team within Engineering Systems (ES), you will set the technical direction for and deliver the CI service that powers Snowflake's repositories and developer ecosystem.
Together with industry-wide experts in distributed systems, cross-cloud development, and engineering excellence, you will evolve our developer infrastructure and tooling to be elastic, large-scale, and highly performant — with simplicity at its core.
As a Staff Engineer on the CI team, you will help Snowflake realize its mission of becoming the premier Data Cloud by accelerating the delivery of high-quality software to production. You will set the technical standard for the team, drive architectural decisions, mentor engineers across the organization, and partner with product and engineering leadership to chart the quarterly and long-term roadmaps. You will ensure the team executes toward serving the current needs of its customers while staying ahead of technological trends and future demands.
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AS A STAFF SOFTWARE ENGINEER — CI, YOU WILL:
- Own the technical direction and architecture of Snowflake's CI platform — designing systems that scale reliably across thousands of developers, millions of builds, and a rapidly growing multi-repository codebase
- Lead the design and implementation of distributed CI services that are elastic, performant, and fault-tolerant across cloud providers
- Drive the CI platform strategy — partner with product managers and engineering leadership to define quarterly and long-term roadmaps that balance customer needs with technical innovation
- Set the engineering bar for the team through code reviews, design reviews, and architectural guidance — ensuring the CI platform is built with the quality and rigor expected of enterprise-grade infrastructure
- Identify and resolve systemic technical challenges — from build performance and resource efficiency to multi-tenant isolation, reliability, and security
- Mentor and develop engineers on the team — elevate technical judgment, design quality, and engineering craftsmanship across the group
- Stay ahead of the curve — evaluate and adopt emerging CI/CD technologies, tooling patterns, and industry best practices to keep Snowflake's developer platform at the leading edge
- Be a key stakeholder in cross-team initiatives that affect developer productivity — collaborating with adjacent ES teams and engineering leadership to shape the broader developer experience
---
OUR IDEAL STAFF SOFTWARE ENGINEER WILL HAVE:
Required:
- 8+ years of industry experience designing and building distributed systems at scale
- A track record of technical leadership — owning system architecture, driving design decisions, and raising the technical bar for a team or organization
- Deep experience with enterprise-grade Continuous Integration for cloud-based distributed systems — you've built, scaled, or significantly evolved CI infrastructure at a comparable scale
- Strong passion for making developers highly productive — you think about developer experience as a product and are energized by making engineers faster and happier
- Excellent CS fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, distributed systems, and systems design
- Fluency in Java, C++, Python, or Go — with the versatility to work across languages and systems
- A strategic mindset — strong sense of what to prioritize for maximum impact and the ability to translate strategy into executable technical plans
- Ability to mentor and influence — you elevate engineers around you through code reviews, design guidance, and technical mentorship
- Excellent communication skills — both written and verbal — with the ability to articulate technical tradeoffs clearly to engineering and leadership audiences
Preferred:
- Experience developing data systems or distributed systems internals
- Hands-on experience with Jenkins, Bazel, ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, or other CI/CD suites at scale
- Experience designing multi-tenant systems with focus on reliability, performance, isolation, and security
- Proven experience authoring roadmap documents, technical design docs, project plans, and RCAs
- Experience with build system optimization — caching strategies, parallelization, incremental builds, and resource scheduling
- Background in developer tooling or platform engineering organizations
---
SNOWFLAKE VALUES WE'RE LOOKING FOR:
- Get It Done — You ship high-quality systems at pace. You don't just design — you build, debug, and deliver.
- Own It — You treat the CI platform as your own. You anticipate where it will break at 10x scale and fix it before it does.
- Make Each Other the Best — You raise the bar for everyone around you. Code reviews, design feedback, and mentorship aren't side activities — they're core to how you work.
- Think Big — You see CI infrastructure as a strategic lever for Snowflake's engineering velocity, not just a build system. You design for the future.
COMPENSATION
Snowflake is committed to pay equity and transparency. Actual compensation will be determined based on factors including relevant experience, skills, location, and internal equity.
Base Salary Range - Total Target Compensation
$236,000 – $354,000 - $271,400 – $407,100
In addition to base salary and bonus (15% target), this role is eligible for equity in the form of RSUs ($600,000 – $1,800,000 range) and a comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, vision, 401(k), ESPP, generous PTO, and more.
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WHY ENGINEERING SYSTEMS AT SNOWFLAKE?
- Build infrastructure that thousands of engineers depend on every day — your work directly multiplies the productivity of Snowflake's entire engineering organization
- Operate at serious scale — millions of builds, thousands of developers, a multi-cloud codebase growing rapidly
- Technical depth and autonomy — you'll own architecture decisions on critical infrastructure with real impact
- Work with exceptional engineers — the ES team includes industry experts in distributed systems, build infrastructure, and developer tooling from Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and beyond
- Competitive compensation and meaningful equity in one of the most important enterprise technology companies in the world
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 an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.
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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