Principal Software Engineer I (AI)

Location: US-CA-Menlo Park, United States

Salary: $264K–$379.5K annually

Company

Snowflake provides an AI Data Cloud supporting critical enterprise workloads across multiple clouds and regions.

What you will do

• Architect and build scalable configuration and feature-flag services with low-latency evaluation, consistency guarantees, fault isolation, and predictable failure behavior.
• Develop automated validation, targeted exposure, progressive rollouts, health-based guardrails, rollback, observability, auditability, and recovery mechanisms.
• Partner with engineering and data science teams on assignment, exposure tracking, and measurement infrastructure for experimentation.
• Embed AI-powered capabilities for configuration discovery, risk assessment, rollout planning, and impact analysis, with rigorous evaluation, security, and reliability standards.
• Deliver APIs, libraries, and self-service tools; guide migrations and simplify the lifecycle from feature-flag creation through retirement.
• Write and review production code, diagnose complex failures, own operational outcomes, mentor engineers, and influence technical direction across teams.

Requirements

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including technical leadership of complex backend or infrastructure initiatives spanning multiple teams.
• Deep experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems, including concurrency, consistency, caching, failure recovery, and performance.
• Hands-on proficiency in Java, Go, C++, or a comparable backend language, with strong computer science fundamentals.
• Experience with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
• Active use of AI throughout the software lifecycle, with the ability to demonstrate improvements to execution, problem-solving, and quality.
• Readiness to build AI-powered platform capabilities and help others adopt AI-first engineering practices.
• Experience turning ambiguous problems into delivered systems, balancing architectural investments with incremental progress, and driving adoption across engineering organizations.
• Clear written communication, low-ego collaboration, strong ownership, and experience mentoring senior engineers.
• A degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to have

• Experience with feature-flag or configuration platforms, distributed control planes, progressive delivery, experimentation infrastructure, or AI-powered developer tools.

Culture & Benefits

• AI-first, experimental approach to engineering and developer productivity.
• Low-ego collaboration, clear communication, strong ownership, and continuous mentoring.
• Focus on challenging ordinary thinking, accelerating innovation, and building reliable systems for critical workloads.