Staff Software Engineer (Data Ingestion)

Location: US-WA-Bellevue, hybrid

Salary: $236K–$339.2K annually

Company

Snowflake operates the AI Data Cloud and builds data storage, processing, and ingestion infrastructure for enterprise customers.

What you will do

• Define the multi-year architecture and technical strategy for high-throughput, external-facing ingestion services and APIs across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
• Lead delivery of enterprise-grade ingestion features with low latency, high availability, and integrations such as Snowpark Connect and partner connectors.
• Author design documents, establish reliability, security, and scalability standards, and lead architectural reviews.
• Partner with architects, product management, security, and external developer platforms to translate customer requirements into resilient system architecture.
• Mentor Senior, Mid-level, and Junior engineers while improving system design, code quality, testing, and operational maturity.
• Work directly with enterprise engineering teams to solve integration challenges, debug production issues, and turn customer feedback into platform capabilities.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems or cloud-native infrastructure in production.
• Architectural leadership experience taking complex customer-facing services or external APIs from concept to General Availability and global scale.
• Expert proficiency in Java or C++, with strong capability across systems-level C++ and managed-service Java frameworks.
• Deep expertise in external API design, cloud service orchestration, resilient multi-tenant endpoints, and at least one relevant domain such as ingestion pipelines, query engines, streaming systems, or database internals.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to drive technical consensus across engineering, product, security, and external stakeholders.
• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to have

• Experience building external developer platforms, SDKs, or public SaaS APIs.
• Expertise with open table formats such as Apache Iceberg or Delta Lake and ecosystems including Apache Spark or Ray.
• Advanced performance engineering experience with memory management, SIMD, vectorization, lock-free data structures, or PB-scale I/O optimization.
• Background in metadata management, transactional state machines, or consensus protocols such as Raft or Paxos.
• Active contribution to open-source data infrastructure, cloud-native compute systems, or query engines.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on customer-facing data infrastructure with strategic impact on Snowflake platform ecosystems and volume.
• Broad architectural scope spanning API layers, control-plane orchestration, file scanners and parsers, query planners, and storage engines.
• Direct exposure to integrations used by Fortune 500 enterprises.
• Environment emphasizing technical autonomy, rigorous engineering, and long-term architectural stewardship.