Principal Engineer (Data Platform)

TL;DR

Principal Engineer (Data Platform): Leading the evolution of declarative data pipelines with an accent on streaming ingestion and real-time data movement. Focus on resolving high-impact technical challenges in incremental processing and improving efficiency of dynamic tables at cloud scale.

Location: Berlin, Germany (Trion Building)

Company

Snowflake is a cloud-native data platform powering the era of the agentic enterprise.

What you will do

• Drive technical strategy and architecture for Data Platform initiatives, focusing on real-time data movement and incremental processing.
• Lead design reviews and establish engineering standards across multiple teams.
• Identify and resolve systemic bottlenecks to reduce latency and improve the efficiency of dynamic tables at cloud scale.
• Mentor and grow senior engineers to raise the overall engineering bar.
• Partner with product and infrastructure leadership to define the roadmap and direction.
• Provide continuous hands-on technical deliverables in the most critical system areas.

Requirements

• 14+ years of software engineering experience with deep expertise in distributed systems.
• Demonstrated track record of defining and delivering platform-scale technical initiatives.
• Expert-level knowledge of streaming and/or batch data systems (e.g., Flink, Spark) and incremental materialization algorithms.
• Strong systems thinking across infrastructure, storage, compute, and API layers.
• Proven ability to influence technical direction across large organizations.
• Excellent written and verbal communication for technical and executive audiences.

Nice to have

• Experience with AI-augmented development practices and integrating LLM-based tooling.
• Familiarity with Snowflake platform internals or other cloud-native data systems.
• Experience with metadata systems, query optimization, or data catalog infrastructure.
• Contributions to top-level Apache open-source projects.

Culture & Benefits

• Environment for AI-native thinkers who treat AI as a high-trust collaborator.
• Culture of low-ego individuals thriving in dynamic, fast-moving environments.
• Emphasis on an experimental mindset and rapid testing of emerging capabilities.