Principal Software Engineer — Performance Engineering (Cloud Infrastructure)

Location: Menlo Park, California, United States

Salary: $264K–$379.5K annually

Company

Snowflake develops cloud data infrastructure and is focused on enabling the agentic enterprise.

What you will do

• Lead evaluation and enablement of new AWS, Azure, and GCP hardware instance types.
• Set performance strategy, measurement methodology, and technical roadmap.
• Build benchmarking, automated validation, scorecard, and performance-modeling infrastructure.
• Analyze CPU microarchitecture, memory bandwidth, PMU counters, and I/O behavior to identify workload bottlenecks.
• Translate benchmark results into pricing, capacity, rollout, and hardware-adoption recommendations.
• Mentor engineers and lead technical partnerships with cloud providers and silicon vendors.

Requirements

• 12+ years of experience in performance, systems, or infrastructure engineering with principal-level technical leadership.
• Deep cloud infrastructure performance expertise across AWS, Azure, or GCP, including instance types, pricing models, and capacity constraints.
• Strong knowledge of CPU microarchitecture, memory bandwidth, I/O subsystems, and profiling tools such as PMU counters.
• Experience building or operating large-scale benchmarking systems and connecting benchmark results to pricing or rollout decisions.
• Ability to create quantitative models linking technical performance metrics to business outcomes.
• Experience leading cross-functional and cross-company initiatives with cloud, hardware, or silicon partners.

Nice to have

• Experience with data warehouse or distributed database performance.
• Experience with early-access hardware programs involving cloud providers or silicon vendors.
• Experience building hardware-emulation systems.

Culture & Benefits

• High-autonomy, high-impact performance engineering role.
• AI-native, experimental, and data-driven working approach.
• Opportunity to build performance engineering capabilities and company-wide education.
• Opportunity to influence cloud hardware strategy and future instance designs.