# Staff Software Engineer - Ingestion
**Company:** [Snowflake](https://scaleengineer.com/companies/snowflake)
As a Staff Software Engineer - File Ingestion at Snowflake, you will lead the architectural vision and execution of next-generation, external-facing ingestion services that power the AI Data Cloud. This role requires deep expertise in distributed systems, API platform design, and delivering customer-facing features at global scale, overseeing high-throughput pipelines handling hundreds of petabytes quarterly while mentoring engineering teams.
**Role:** Staff Engineer
**Seniority:** Staff
**Locations:** US-WA-Bellevue
**Salary:** 236000–339200 USD
[Apply](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/snowflake/35dfd8bf-a458-4c9c-a5d2-0b5d487b9640)
Canonical: https://scaleengineer.com/jobs/snowflake/staff-software-engineer-ingestion
---
## Responsibilities

- Drive Technical Vision and Multi-Year Architecture: Define and establish the comprehensive technical strategy for high-throughput, external-facing ingestion services and APIs across multi-cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP). Create foundational design documents that establish technical standards for reliability, security, and scalability across the entire ingestion platform stack.
- Lead End-to-End Feature Execution: Own the complete delivery pipeline for enterprise-grade external features, ensuring low-latency data landing, high availability, and seamless ecosystem integration with platforms like Snowpark Connect and partner connectors. Drive features from concept through General Availability (GA) to global scale.
- Architect Customer-Facing Services: Design and oversee the implementation of resilient, multi-tenant customer-facing endpoints and external APIs that expose file-ingest capabilities to external platforms, partner ecosystems, and customer applications. Ensure systems handle hundreds of petabytes of data quarterly with consistent performance.
- Lead Cross-Functional Technical Alignment: Partner with Principal Architects, Product Management, Security teams, and external developer platforms to translate enterprise customer requirements into robust system architecture. Facilitate high-stakes architectural reviews and establish consensus across multiple engineering organizations.
- Mentor and Elevate Engineering Excellence: Mentor and sponsor Senior, Mid-level, and Junior engineers on the team. Raise the bar for system design practices, code quality standards, testing methodologies, and operational maturity across the organization. Build a culture of technical leadership and continuous improvement.
- Direct Customer Engagement and Production Support: Engage directly with enterprise customer engineering teams to resolve complex integration challenges and debug production edge cases at scale. Translate real-world customer feedback and requirements into core platform capabilities that drive immediate business impact.

## Requirements

### education

- {"name":"Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or Related Field","description":"BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical software engineering experience demonstrating mastery of fundamental computer science concepts."}

### technical

- {"name":"Expert-Level Java or C++","description":"Demonstrate expert proficiency in Java or C++, with particular strength in engineers comfortable working across both systems-level C++ for performance-critical components and managed service Java frameworks for cloud infrastructure."}
- {"name":"External API Design and Orchestration","description":"Deep expertise in designing external APIs, cloud service orchestration patterns, and building resilient multi-tenant customer-facing endpoints that maintain high availability, low latency, and consistent performance under demanding production loads."}
- {"name":"Distributed Systems Architecture","description":"Proven expertise in designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems in production environments. Understanding of consensus protocols, transactional state machines, and coordination across geographically distributed components."}
- {"name":"High-Throughput Data Ingestion Pipelines","description":"Domain knowledge in at least one specialized area: high-throughput ingestion pipelines handling petabyte-scale data volumes, distributed query execution engines, messaging and streaming systems (Kafka, Pulsar), or database internals and query optimization."}
- {"name":"Cloud-Native Infrastructure","description":"Deep understanding of multi-cloud architectures, containerization, orchestration platforms, and the operational considerations for running mission-critical services across AWS, Azure, and GCP environments."}

### experience

- {"name":"10+ Years of Distributed Systems Experience","description":"Minimum 10 years of professional experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems or cloud-native infrastructure in production environments with proven stability and scale."}
- {"name":"Architectural Leadership Track Record","description":"Demonstrated track record of architectural leadership with successful examples of taking complex, customer-facing services or external APIs from initial concept through General Availability (GA) and scaling to global production deployments."}
- {"name":"Cross-Functional Technical Leadership","description":"Proven ability to drive technical consensus and influence across cross-functional teams including Product, Security, Infrastructure, and external technical stakeholders. Evidence of setting technical direction and establishing standards that elevate organizational practices."}

## Skills

### required

- {"name":"Distributed Systems Design","description":"Advanced capability in designing fault-tolerant, scalable systems with deep understanding of consistency models, failure modes, and recovery strategies at petabyte scale."}
- {"name":"API Design and Platform Architecture","description":"Expertise in designing robust external APIs, versioning strategies, backward compatibility, rate limiting, and building developer-friendly platforms that scale to millions of requests."}
- {"name":"Production Systems Engineering","description":"Strong operational excellence background including monitoring, observability, debugging production incidents, performance optimization, and maintaining high availability SLAs."}
- {"name":"Technical Documentation and Communication","description":"Exceptional written and verbal communication skills with demonstrated ability to articulate complex technical concepts, drive technical consensus, and influence engineering decisions across organizations."}
- {"name":"System Performance Optimization","description":"Expertise in identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks in high-throughput systems, including profiling, optimization techniques, and latency analysis."}

### preferred

- {"name":"External Developer Platforms","description":"Experience building and scaling external developer platforms, SDKs, or public SaaS APIs serving external consumer bases and managing developer ecosystem growth."}
- {"name":"Open Table Format Expertise","description":"Deep familiarity with open table formats like Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake, plus integration experience with ecosystem tools like Apache Spark and Ray for data processing."}
- {"name":"Advanced Performance Engineering","description":"Specialized knowledge in memory management optimization, SIMD vectorization, lock-free data structures, cache optimization, and I/O performance tuning at massive scale."}
- {"name":"Metadata Management and Consensus Protocols","description":"Strong background in building metadata systems, implementing transactional state machines, and working with distributed consensus protocols like Raft or Paxos."}
- {"name":"Open-Source Infrastructure Contributions","description":"Active contributions to open-source data infrastructure projects, cloud-native compute systems, or query engine development, demonstrating commitment to the broader engineering community."}

## Tech stack

### tools

- {"name":"Kubernetes","description":"Container orchestration platform for managing distributed applications across multi-cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP)."}
- {"name":"Docker","description":"Containerization technology for packaging and deploying cloud-native services with consistent environments."}
- {"name":"AWS, Azure, GCP","description":"Multi-cloud platforms where Snowflake operates, requiring expertise across all three major cloud providers for global service deployment."}
- {"name":"Prometheus and Grafana","description":"Monitoring and observability stack for tracking system performance, reliability metrics, and debugging production issues."}
- {"name":"Git and CI/CD","description":"Version control and continuous integration/deployment pipelines for managing code changes, testing, and deployment automation."}

### others

- {"name":"REST API Design","description":"Expertise in designing scalable, versioned, and developer-friendly REST APIs for external consumption by enterprise customers."}
- {"name":"gRPC and Protocol Buffers","description":"High-performance RPC framework and serialization format for efficient inter-service communication in distributed systems."}
- {"name":"Data Format Parsing","description":"Experience with parsing and processing multiple data formats (CSV, JSON, Parquet, Avro, ORC) at scale within ingestion pipelines."}
- {"name":"Consensus Algorithms","description":"Understanding of distributed consensus mechanisms like Raft or Paxos for building fault-tolerant distributed systems."}

### databases

- {"name":"Snowflake","description":"Cloud-native data warehouse and analytics platform built on multi-cloud infrastructure, understanding internal architecture is essential for this role."}
- {"name":"Apache Iceberg","description":"Open table format for analytical databases supporting ACID transactions and schema evolution, increasingly important for data lake architectures."}
- {"name":"Delta Lake","description":"Open-source storage layer providing ACID transactions and unified batch and streaming semantics on data lakes."}

### languages

- {"name":"Java","description":"Primary language for building cloud-native microservices, framework-based applications, and managing memory-efficient distributed systems at scale."}
- {"name":"C++","description":"Systems-level language for performance-critical components, low-latency processing, memory management, and building high-throughput data pipeline engines."}
- {"name":"SQL","description":"Essential for understanding data ingestion patterns, query optimization, and integrating with Snowflake's SQL query execution engine."}

### frameworks

- {"name":"Apache Kafka","description":"Distributed event streaming platform for building high-throughput, fault-tolerant data pipelines and message queuing systems."}
- {"name":"Apache Spark","description":"Distributed data processing framework for large-scale analytics and batch processing integrated with Snowflake's ecosystem."}
- {"name":"Spring Framework","description":"Enterprise Java application framework commonly used for building cloud-native microservices and REST APIs."}
- {"name":"Snowpark","description":"Snowflake's developer platform for building data applications with client libraries in Python, Java, and Scala."}

## Benefits

### benefits

- {"name":"Comprehensive Health Insurance","description":"Medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents, including preventive care and wellness programs."}
- {"name":"Equity and Stock Options","description":"Competitive equity packages allowing engineers to participate in company growth and success as stakeholders."}
- {"name":"401(k) Retirement Planning","description":"Employer-sponsored retirement plan with company matching contributions for long-term financial security."}
- {"name":"Flexible Work Arrangements","description":"Remote work options and flexible scheduling to support work-life balance and accommodate diverse working styles."}
- {"name":"Professional Development","description":"Learning budgets, conference attendance, training programs, and mentorship opportunities for continuous skill development."}
- {"name":"Parental Leave","description":"Generous paid parental leave policies supporting employees during life transitions."}
- {"name":"Mental Health and Wellness","description":"Counseling services, meditation apps, fitness stipends, and wellness programs supporting overall employee wellbeing."}
- {"name":"Paid Time Off","description":"Competitive vacation, sick leave, and personal time policies supporting work-life balance."}

## Compensation

- **max:** 310000
- **min:** 220000
- **currency:** USD
- **stockOptions:** true

## Interview process

### steps

- {"name":"Initial Recruiter Screen","description":"Preliminary conversation with technical recruiter to assess background, experience with distributed systems, and alignment with Snowflake's culture and engineering values. Typically 30 minutes and focuses on career trajectory and motivation."}
- {"name":"Technical Architecture Interview","description":"Deep-dive with a Staff or Senior engineer covering distributed systems design, API architecture, and approach to solving large-scale ingestion challenges. Expect to discuss past architectural decisions, trade-offs, and system design principles. Approximately 60 minutes."}
- {"name":"Systems Design Deep-Dive","description":"Focused technical interview on designing customer-facing external APIs and high-throughput ingestion services. May include whiteboarding exercises, discussing scalability considerations, multi-tenancy patterns, and handling edge cases in production."}
- {"name":"Leadership and Cross-Functional Collaboration","description":"Conversation with Product Management, Security, or Infrastructure leadership assessing ability to influence across organizations, drive consensus, and translate customer requirements into technical strategy. Discusses mentorship philosophy and team elevation."}
- {"name":"Domain Expertise Assessment","description":"Technical discussion focused on specific domain knowledge in ingestion pipelines, query execution engines, streaming systems, or database internals. Validates depth in one or more critical technical areas aligned with role requirements."}
- {"name":"Final Leadership Round","description":"Meeting with engineering leadership or principal architect to assess cultural fit, long-term vision alignment, and readiness for staff-level architectural impact. Discusses role's strategic importance to Snowflake's platform evolution."}

## 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.

# **Staff Software Engineer – File Ingestion (Customer-Facing Services)**

### **Build the Future of the AI Data Cloud**

Snowflake’s File Ingestion team owns the core engines behind **COPY INTO** and **Snowpipe** — the primary arteries landing customer data into the AI Data Cloud at hundreds of petabytes per quarter.

We are expanding our core mission to build next-generation, **external-facing ingestion services** that directly expose file-ingest capabilities to external platforms, partner ecosystems, and customer applications. As a **Staff Software Engineer**, you will lead the architectural vision and execution for these mission-critical, customer-facing services. You will operate at the intersection of high-throughput distributed systems, API platform design, and direct customer feature delivery, defining how enterprise data seamlessly flows into Snowflake at global scale.

### **What You’ll Do**

* **Drive Technical Vision & Architecture:** Define the multi-year architecture and technical strategy for high-throughput, external-facing ingestion services and APIs across multi-cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP).
* **Deliver Customer-Facing Innovations:** Lead the end-to-end execution of enterprise-grade external features, ensuring low-latency data landing, high availability, and seamless ecosystem integration (e.g., Snowpark Connect, partner connectors).
* **Set Technical Direction:** Author foundational design documents, establish technical standards for reliability, security, and scalability, and lead high-stakes architectural reviews across engineering orgs.
* **Lead Cross-Functional Alignment:** Partner closely with Principal Architects, Product Management, Security, and external developer platforms to translate customer requirements into resilient system architecture.
* **Elevate Engineering Excellence:** Mentor and sponsor Senior, Mid-level, and Junior engineers; raise the bar for system design, code quality, testing methodologies, and operational maturity.
* **Direct Customer & Strategic Impact:** Engage with enterprise customer engineering teams to solve complex integration challenges, debug production edge cases at scale, and turn direct customer feedback into core platform capabilities.

### **What We’re Looking For**

* **10+ years** of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems or cloud-native infrastructure in production.
* Proven track record of **architectural leadership**, having successfully taken complex, customer-facing services or external APIs from initial concept to General Availability (GA) and global scale.
* **Expert proficiency in Java or C++** (strong preference for engineers comfortable working across both systems-level C++ and managed service Java frameworks).
* Deep expertise in **external API design, cloud service orchestration**, and building resilient, multi-tenant customer-facing endpoints.
* Deep domain knowledge in at least one of the following: high-throughput ingestion pipelines, distributed query execution engines, messaging/streaming systems (e.g., Kafka, Pulsar), or database internals.
* Exceptional written and verbal communication skills with a demonstrated ability to drive technical consensus across cross-functional leadership, product partners, and external technical stakeholders.
* BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

### **Bonus Points**

* Experience building and scaling **external developer platforms, SDKs, or public SaaS APIs** serving external consumers.
* Deep expertise with **open table formats** (Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake) and integration with ecosystems like Apache Spark or Ray.
* Advanced performance engineering expertise: memory management, SIMD, vectorization, lock-free data structures, or I/O optimization at PB-scale.
* Strong background in metadata management, transactional state machines, or consensus protocols (e.g., Raft, Paxos).
* Active contributor to open-source data infrastructure, cloud-native compute systems, or query engines.

### **Why This Team**

* **Massive Strategic Impact:** You will lead the expansion of Snowflake's most critical data-path surface into direct, customer-facing integrations that unlock new platform ecosystems and drive platform volume.
* **Broad Architectural Scope:** Your work will bridge edge API layers, control-plane orchestrators, file scanners/parsers, query planners, and underlying storage engines.
* **High Customer Visibility:** Work directly on features that power the external integrations for Fortune 500 enterprises, seeing the immediate revenue and performance impact of your architecture.
* **Culture of Technical Leadership:** Partner directly with Snowflake’s top architects and leads in an environment that values deep technical autonomy, rigorous engineering, and long-term architectural stewardship.

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)