Staff Software Engineer, Snowpark Container Service
Staff Engineer · Staff · Full Time
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Role
What you'll do.
Staff Software Engineer role at Snowflake building the Snowpark Container Service, a managed container platform enabling customers to deploy and scale containerized applications within Snowflake's Data Cloud. This position requires 10+ years of distributed systems and infrastructure experience, combining technical leadership, hands-on architecture design, and team mentorship to deliver highly scalable, reliable Kubernetes-based container compute services for enterprise customers.
Responsibilities
- Design and develop containerized compute platform features: Architect and implement Kubernetes-based, OCI-compliant container services that enable customers to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications within Snowflake without data movement. Design features that meet evolving business requirements while supporting enterprise-scale deployments.
- Lead technical strategy and engineering team: Establish technical direction for critical product surface areas, mentor engineers on the team, and guide their professional development. Own the architectural vision for Snowpark Container Services and drive alignment across cross-functional stakeholders to ensure successful execution of strategic initiatives.
- Manage end-to-end project lifecycle: Take ownership of complete project delivery including design specifications, code implementation, peer reviews, comprehensive testing strategies, observability instrumentation, tooling infrastructure, and on-call support rotations to ensure production reliability.
- Build highly reliable, fault-tolerant systems: Design and implement software architecture that prioritizes reliability, fault tolerance, and resilience to meet the demanding requirements of Snowflake's largest enterprise customers. Implement advanced error handling, graceful degradation, and recovery mechanisms.
- Ensure operational excellence and system observability: Drive operational readiness through comprehensive monitoring, logging, and alerting strategies. Focus on debuggability and performance optimization, ensuring the service maintains high availability, quick incident response, and continuous performance tuning for mission-critical workloads.
- Collaborate across engineering functions and teams: Partner with other Snowflake product teams, infrastructure groups, and cloud platform engineers to integrate Snowpark Container Services across the broader Data Cloud ecosystem. Contribute to architectural decisions that span multiple organizational boundaries and platform dependencies.
Qualifications
What we look for.
Technical
Kubernetes architecture and container orchestration
Deep expertise in designing, deploying, and scaling Kubernetes clusters and container services in production environments. Experience implementing OCI-compliant container specifications, managing containerized workload orchestration, and operating Kubernetes at scale for multi-tenant environments.
Distributed systems design and implementation
Strong foundation in distributed computing principles including consensus algorithms, fault tolerance, replication strategies, and scalability patterns. Proven ability to architect systems that handle thousands of concurrent operations while maintaining consistency and high availability.
Cloud infrastructure and multi-cloud platforms
Experience architecting and deploying services across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Understanding of cloud-native patterns, infrastructure-as-code principles, and multi-cloud abstraction layers to ensure platform portability and operational consistency.
Multi-tenant system design with security and isolation
Expertise in designing multi-tenant architectures with focus on data isolation, resource management, security boundaries, and performance fairness across tenants. Experience implementing role-based access control, tenant quota management, and audit logging.
Java, C++, or Go programming languages
Proficient hands-on coding experience in at least one of these systems programming languages. Experience with language-specific ecosystem tools, performance profiling, memory management, and distributed application development.
Education
Computer Science fundamentals
Strong theoretical foundation in computer science including algorithms, data structures, complexity analysis, networking, and operating systems. Ability to apply computer science principles to solve complex engineering challenges.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field (preferred)
Formal education in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience demonstrating deep technical knowledge and problem-solving capabilities in software systems.
Experience
10+ years building large-scale systems
Minimum one decade of experience designing, building, and operating complex distributed systems and infrastructure-level platforms. Track record of shipping production systems serving millions of users or handling massive data volumes and throughput.
Technical leadership and mentoring
Demonstrated experience leading engineering teams, providing technical mentorship, establishing coding standards, and driving architectural decisions. Experience balancing hands-on contribution with leadership responsibilities.
Production system reliability and operations
Extensive experience operating production systems at scale, including on-call responsibilities, incident response, post-mortems, and operational excellence initiatives. Proven track record of building and maintaining high-availability services with strong SLAs.
Cross-functional collaboration
Success working across multiple engineering teams, product management, and business functions. Experience navigating organizational complexity, managing dependencies, and driving consensus on technical decisions across stakeholder groups.
Skills
Required
Kubernetes and container orchestration
Production-grade Kubernetes architecture, deployment, scaling, and troubleshooting for containerized applications
Distributed systems architecture
Design patterns for scalable, fault-tolerant systems handling high concurrency and complex state management
Systems programming
Proficiency in Java, C++, or Go for building high-performance, low-latency systems and infrastructure components
Cloud platform expertise
Deep knowledge of AWS, Azure, or GCP services, cloud-native architecture patterns, and infrastructure-as-code tooling
Production operations and reliability engineering
Experience implementing monitoring, observability, incident response processes, and operational best practices for mission-critical services
Preferred
Multi-cloud deployment experience
Nice to haveHands-on experience designing and deploying systems across multiple cloud providers with consistent abstractions and operational models
Multi-tenant platform design
Nice to haveExperience building and operating multi-tenant services with strong focus on performance isolation, security boundaries, and resource management
Container registry and supply chain security
Nice to haveExperience with OCI image specifications, container security scanning, image signing, and secure container delivery pipelines
Data platform or warehouse engineering
Nice to haveBackground in building data infrastructure, analytics platforms, or data processing services that demonstrates understanding of data-centric system requirements
Observability and distributed tracing
Nice to haveExperience implementing comprehensive monitoring, logging, metrics collection, and distributed tracing systems for complex infrastructure
Tech stack
Languages
Frameworks
Databases
Tools
Other
Compensation
Pay and benefits.
Base·USD 236,000 – 339,200
Equity·Stock options
Benefits
Health, dental, and vision insurance
Comprehensive medical coverage with access to preventive care, specialist services, and prescription medications
401(k) retirement plan
Tax-advantaged retirement savings plan with employer matching to support long-term financial planning
Paid time off and flexible scheduling
Competitive vacation days, sick leave, and flexible work arrangements supporting work-life balance
Professional development and learning opportunities
Access to training programs, technical certifications, conference attendance, and continuous learning resources
Stock options and equity grants
Opportunities for ownership in Snowflake's growth as a public company through equity compensation packages
Relocation assistance
Support for qualified candidates relocating to the Bellevue, Washington metropolitan area
Process
Interview steps.
- 01
Initial phone screening
Introductory conversation with Snowflake recruiter covering background, motivation for the Staff Engineer role, and alignment with Snowpark Container Service team
- 02
Technical assessment
Focused evaluation of distributed systems knowledge, container orchestration expertise, and architectural thinking. Expect discussion of past system design decisions and trade-offs
- 03
System design interview
Whiteboard or collaborative deep-dive into designing scalable container platforms, multi-tenant architectures, or similar infrastructure systems. Assessment of breadth across cloud providers and operational considerations
- 04
Leadership and mentoring discussion
Conversation with hiring manager about technical leadership philosophy, team building approach, mentoring style, and experience driving cross-functional initiatives
- 05
Executive or senior leader conversation
Discussion with engineering leadership covering strategic vision for Snowpark Container Services, career growth opportunities, and cultural fit with Snowflake's innovation-focused environment
- 06
Offer stage
Negotiation of compensation package including base salary, stock options, bonus structure, and benefits enrollment
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 looking for a talented and passionate Staff Software Engineer for our Snowpark Container Service, part of our Snowflake Compute Platform - to build our elastic, high-scale, high-performance, cloud native compute platform to enable bringing Compute to Data effortless and simple.
Snowpark Container Services is a fully managed container offering that helps our customers easily deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications without having to move data out of Snowflake. As a fully managed service, it comes with Snowflake security, configuration, and operational best practices built in. You will be part of this highly productive, fast moving, and growing team that is critical to realizing Snowflake’s Data Cloud Mission.
AS A STAFF SOFTWARE ENGINEER, YOU WILL:
Design and develop features, understand customer requirements and meet business goals.
Lead a team of engineers, including mentoring and guiding them, and build technical direction and strategy for large and critical parts of the product surface area.
Manage all aspects of the Project, including Design, Coding, Reviews, Testing, Observability, Tooling and On-Call support.
Build highly reliable and fault-tolerant software to meet the needs of the largest customers.
Ensure operational readiness and maintainability of the service with heavy focus on reliability, availability, debuggability and performance.
Design and build Kubernetes based OCI compliant container compute platform features and capabilities that scale and evolve with changing business and customer needs.
Snowpark Container Services is still in an early stage of development - it is an amazing opportunity for outsized impact on Snowflake’s growth story.
OUR IDEAL CANDIDATE WILL HAVE MOST OF THE FOLLOWING QUALIFICATIONS:
Excitement to learn new things - passion to learn and grow are keys to success on this team.
Be a team player - Our team culture is a priority. Transparency, knowledge sharing, fun events, and helping each other are all part of our work environment
Work across functions and across teams - we don’t only work on code that we own, we work with other parts of Snowflake every day.
10+ years of industry experience building features and capabilities of large scale systems or infrastructure level platforms.
Extremely strong fundamental computer science skills and experience building distributed systems.
Hands-on coding experience in Java, C++ or Go is highly desirable
Ability to work on-site in our downtown Bellevue office.
BONUS POINTS FOR THE FOLLOWING INDUSTRY EXPERIENCE:
Experience building products or services with Kubernetes.
Designing and implementing products and features with multi-cloud support (AWS, Azure, GCP).
Implementing multi-tenant systems with focus on performance, isolation and security.
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 custome
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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