Principal Engineer 2 (Database Systems)

Location: Hybrid in Menlo Park, California or Bellevue, Washington, United States

Salary: $304K–$380K annually

Company

Snowflake is building cloud-native transactional systems and governed data infrastructure for applications, AI, and autonomous agents.

What you will do

• Define and drive long-term OLTP architecture across Snowflake Postgres, Unistore, and supporting infrastructure.
• Lead architectural decisions involving transactions, storage, concurrency control, replication, recovery, query execution, and database scalability.
• Shape compute and storage architecture for low-latency, highly available transactional systems, including isolation, elasticity, networking, caching, and containers.
• Build database primitives for agent-driven workloads, including isolated environments, checkpointing, rollback, and programmatic lifecycle management.
• Define safe agent access to operational state with strong consistency, recovery, access control, and governance guarantees.
• Lead cross-organizational engineering efforts, mentor engineers, and influence product and technical direction with leaders and strategic customers.

Requirements

• 15+ years of experience building databases, distributed systems, storage systems, or large-scale cloud infrastructure.
• Deep expertise in OLTP and database systems, including transactions, concurrency control, storage engines, indexing, query processing, replication, recovery, and high availability.
• Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure for low-latency stateful systems, including compute, storage, networking, resource isolation, and failure handling.
• Experience designing elastic, multi-tenant, or rapidly provisioned stateful systems with strong isolation and lifecycle management.
• Experience taking technically ambitious systems from architecture through production and influencing direction across multiple teams.
• Exceptional systems engineering, technical judgment, communication, and architecture leadership skills.

Nice to have

• Deep PostgreSQL expertise.
• Strong systems programming experience with C, C++, or Rust.
• Experience designing AI-native applications, autonomous agents, ephemeral state, sandboxing, and safe transactional actions.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work arrangement in Menlo Park or Bellevue.
• Opportunity to shape Snowflake's transactional and operational product direction.
• Work on fundamental database and distributed-systems problems across the broader Data & AI platform.
• Employees must follow confidentiality and data security standards when handling sensitive customer information.