Tech Lead Manager - SUT Team
Engineering Manager · Lead · Full Time
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Role
What you'll do.
Lead Snowflake's System Under Test (SUT) team as a Tech Lead Manager, driving infrastructure and developer experience improvements for CI/CD pipelines. You'll combine hands-on technical leadership with team management, optimizing testing reliability, latency, and cost across Snowflake's engineering organization while partnering with cross-functional infrastructure and product teams.
Responsibilities
- Team Leadership and Development: Lead, mentor, and grow the SUT team by fostering a high-energy, collaborative environment with strong emphasis on planning, ownership, and career development. Establish clear performance expectations, conduct regular 1:1s, create opportunities for skill advancement, and build a culture of technical excellence and innovation.
- Roadmap Ownership and Execution: Own the complete SUT roadmap and drive execution across development environments, CI pipelines, and AI-assisted engineering workflows. Define quarterly objectives, prioritize features and improvements, manage dependencies with cross-functional teams, and ensure timely delivery of platform enhancements.
- Performance Optimization and Metrics: Drive measurable improvements in system reliability, latency, and cost efficiency through establishment of clear Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and operational dashboards. Monitor key performance indicators, identify bottlenecks, and implement data-driven optimizations that elevate execution standards across the testing infrastructure.
- Technical Architecture and Strategy: Serve as the technical authority for the SUT domain, making critical architectural decisions and guiding the platform evolution from legacy systems toward a modern, composable, and containerized architecture. Evaluate emerging technologies, design system improvements, and ensure technical decisions align with long-term platform strategy.
- Operational Excellence and Incident Management: Establish and maintain operational excellence standards including on-call health, incident response procedures, and postmortem processes. Balance project delivery with ongoing maintenance and support responsibilities, ensuring the SUT platform maintains high availability while supporting continuous improvement.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration and Stakeholder Alignment: Partner strategically with Engineering Systems teams and product engineering groups to understand requirements, align on priorities, and deliver solutions that improve developer experience across Snowflake. Communicate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences, secure stakeholder buy-in, and drive consensus on strategic initiatives.
Qualifications
What we look for.
Technical
Distributed Systems Architecture
Deep expertise in designing and operating distributed systems, including understanding of CAP theorem, eventual consistency, fault tolerance, and scalability patterns. Experience debugging complex interactions across multiple services and components.
Kubernetes and Container Orchestration
Strong hands-on experience with Kubernetes clusters, including cluster management, resource optimization, networking, storage, and workload orchestration. Familiarity with Kubernetes operations, debugging, and performance tuning in production environments.
CI/CD Pipeline Architecture
Proven experience designing and operating large-scale continuous integration and deployment pipelines. Knowledge of build systems, test automation frameworks, artifact management, and orchestration tools used in high-velocity engineering environments.
Developer Infrastructure and Tooling
Experience building or evolving developer productivity platforms, local development environments, and internal developer platforms. Understanding of developer experience metrics, observability, and tools that enable engineering teams to move faster.
Performance Engineering and Optimization
Demonstrated ability to identify performance bottlenecks, establish SLOs, implement monitoring and alerting, and drive systematic optimization efforts. Experience with profiling tools, metrics collection, and data-driven performance improvement.
Education
Computer Science or Related Field
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience. Strong foundation in computer science fundamentals, system design, and algorithms.
Experience
10+ Years Software Engineering
Comprehensive hands-on software engineering background with experience spanning multiple domains, technologies, and platforms. Demonstrated expertise in shipping production systems, understanding distributed systems tradeoffs, and solving complex technical problems.
1+ Years Technical Team Leadership
Proven experience leading small to mid-sized technical engineering teams with demonstrated success in people management, roadmap ownership, and maintaining hands-on technical contributions. Evidence of growing team members, making architectural decisions, and balancing execution with team development.
Large-Scale Platform Operations
Experience operating large-scale internal platforms or infrastructure serving hundreds or thousands of engineers. Familiarity with operational challenges at scale including reliability, cost optimization, capacity planning, and incident response.
Cross-Functional Collaboration at Scale
Track record of successfully partnering across multiple engineering teams and departments to deliver shared infrastructure or platform improvements. Experience managing competing priorities, aligning stakeholders, and driving consensus on technical direction.
Skills
Required
Systems Thinking
Ability to reason about complex systems holistically, understanding dependencies, tradeoffs, and emergent behaviors. Comfortable making architectural decisions that balance multiple concerns including reliability, performance, cost, and maintainability.
Technical Leadership and Decision Making
Strong judgment in making architectural and technical decisions without consensus. Ability to evaluate options systematically, communicate rationale clearly, and adjust course based on new information. Balance pragmatism with long-term technical vision.
Stakeholder Communication
Excellent written and verbal communication skills with ability to translate complex technical concepts for diverse audiences. Skilled at building alignment, securing buy-in, and bringing clarity to ambiguous cross-functional initiatives. Comfort presenting to senior leadership.
Operational Leadership
Experience establishing operational standards, managing on-call rotations, leading incident response, and conducting postmortems. Ability to balance ongoing support and maintenance with project delivery. Strong focus on reliability and customer-obsessed mindset.
Team Leadership and Mentorship
Demonstrated ability to recruit, hire, onboard, and develop high-performing engineering teams. Skilled at providing feedback, creating growth opportunities, establishing team culture, and fostering psychological safety. Experience conducting performance reviews and career development planning.
Data-Driven Decision Making
Bias toward measuring impact and making decisions grounded in data. Experience establishing clear metrics and KPIs, building dashboards, and using observability to understand system behavior. Ability to set and track SLOs.
Preferred
Developer Productivity Tooling
Nice to haveExperience building or working on developer productivity tools, local development environments, or internal developer platforms. Understanding of what makes tools delightful for engineers and ability to measure developer satisfaction.
AI-Assisted Engineering Workflows
Nice to haveExperience integrating AI/ML capabilities into development workflows or infrastructure. Familiarity with AI-assisted coding, automated testing, and how to design systems that leverage AI to improve developer productivity.
Modern CI/Test Platform Modernization
Nice to haveTrack record of successfully modernizing legacy CI/testing infrastructure. Experience migrating from older systems to containerized, cloud-native architectures. Familiarity with contemporary test frameworks, observability platforms, and infrastructure-as-code practices.
Cost Optimization and Cloud Economics
Nice to haveExperience optimizing infrastructure costs in cloud environments while maintaining performance and reliability. Understanding of resource utilization, waste identification, and cost-benefit analysis in infrastructure decisions.
Agile and Roadmap Planning
Nice to haveExperience running effective roadmap planning sessions, managing quarterly objectives, and communicating priorities across teams. Familiarity with OKR frameworks or similar goal-setting methodologies.
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 company contributions. Covers employee and eligible family members with flexible plan options.
Retirement Planning
401(k) retirement plan with company matching contributions. Financial planning resources and retirement counseling services.
Paid Time Off
Generous paid vacation, sick leave, and company holidays. Flexible time off policies supporting work-life balance and employee wellness.
Equity Compensation
Stock options or RSU grants enabling employees to share in company success. Competitive equity packages for senior technical leadership roles.
Professional Development
Learning budgets for conferences, certifications, and training programs. Access to online learning platforms and mentorship opportunities supporting career growth.
Mental Health and Wellness
Comprehensive mental health support including counseling services, wellness programs, and resources for stress management and work-life integration.
Parental Leave
Paid parental leave supporting family building and bonding with newborns or newly adopted children.
Remote Work Flexibility
Flexible work arrangements supporting remote, hybrid, or office-based work based on role and team needs.
Process
Interview steps.
- 01
Initial Screening Call
Conversation with recruiter to discuss your background, motivation for the role, and Snowflake's culture and values. This 30-minute call ensures alignment on role expectations and career interests.
- 02
Technical Manager Interview
Deep-dive conversation with the hiring manager covering your technical background, leadership philosophy, and approach to team development. Discussion of specific examples demonstrating your experience with infrastructure, distributed systems, and team leadership.
- 03
Peer Technical Discussion
Conversation with a peer-level engineer or infrastructure lead to assess technical depth, systems thinking, and communication ability. May include architecture discussion or evaluation of your approach to complex technical problems.
- 04
Cross-Functional Stakeholder Interview
Meeting with representatives from product engineering or other partner teams to evaluate collaboration skills, communication across boundaries, and understanding of customer needs. Assessment of ability to build alignment and influence without direct authority.
- 05
Leadership and Culture Fit Discussion
Conversation focusing on leadership philosophy, team development approach, and alignment with Snowflake's values including being customer-obsessed and embracing innovation. Discussion of how you foster psychological safety and continuous learning.
- 06
Executive Debrief
Final conversation with senior leadership or department head to discuss vision alignment, strategic thinking, and long-term perspectives. Opportunity to ask questions about career growth and company direction.
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 talented Tech Lead Manager (TLM) to lead Snowflake’s System Under Test (SUT) team, responsible for evolving how Snowflake engineers test the Snowflake product locally and at scale in CI. The SUT empowers Snowflake engineers by delivering a reliable, low-latency and cost-efficient developer experience across a high-growth, high-demand surface area.
As the TLM for SUT, you will lead a small and highly technical team at the intersection of CI, developer infrastructure, and product engineering. You will set direction, drive execution, and partner broadly across Engineering Systems and product teams to deliver a more reliable, faster, and more maintainable test platform for Snowflake’s engineers.
In this role, you will:
Lead, coach, and grow the SUT team while creating a high-energy, cohesive environment with strong planning, ownership, and career development.
Own the roadmap and execution for SUT rollout across development environments, CI and AI workflows.
Drive measurable improvements in startup reliability, latency, and cost, using clear SLOs, dashboards, and operational metrics to guide decisions and raise the bar on execution.
Serve as the technical anchor for the SUT domain, shaping architecture and guiding the evolution from legacy systems to a composable, containerized platform.
Own operational excellence for the area, including on-call health, incident response, postmortems, and balancing project delivery with ongoing maintenance and support work.
Our ideal candidate will have:
10+ years of hands-on software engineering experience
1+ years of experience leading a technical engineering team with a strong mix of people leadership, roadmap ownership, and hands-on technical judgment.
Strong systems thinking and comfort working across distributed systems, Kubernetes-based infrastructure, and modern engineering tooling.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to align stakeholders, secure buy-in, and bring clarity to ambiguous, cross-functional work.
A pragmatic, customer-obsessed mindset and a bias for measurable impact through reliability, performance, and ease of use.
Bonus points for experience with developer productivity tooling, AI-assisted engineering workflows, and modern CI/test platform modernization efforts.
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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