Backend Infrastructure Engineer (AI)

Location: Menlo Park, California, United States; hybrid

Salary: $200,000–$270,000 per year

Company

Snowflake provides a cloud data platform and is developing enterprise AI products through its Cortex Apps team.

What you will do

• Architect and scale agentic runtimes that execute complex workflows with low-latency tool execution and robust state management.
• Design context-engineering infrastructure for RAG, including vector database integration, search indexing, query processing, ranking, semantic caching, and metadata extraction.
• Build evaluation infrastructure for large-scale golden-set simulations, error analysis, and hillclimbing experiments.
• Productionize LLM capabilities as hardened, multi-tenant microservices with guardrails and observability.
• Define infrastructure strategies for model routing, prompt caching, and token optimization.
• Collaborate with modeling and engineering teams on customer-facing technical issues, platform gaps, and cross-layer debugging.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field.
• 7+ years of experience building distributed systems, high-throughput APIs, or backend infrastructure for AI/ML products.
• Deep proficiency in Go or Java for systems development and Python for AI orchestration.
• Strong knowledge of database internals, distributed state management, and cloud-native architecture, including Kubernetes and FoundationDB.
• Experience with vector indices, agent platforms, scalable data pipelines, query optimization, SQL engine internals, and large-scale search infrastructure.
• Ability to design multi-tenant systems handling sensitive enterprise data and diagnose problems across services using logs and telemetry.

Nice to have

• Direct experience with the agent runtime, context retrieval, evaluation, or AI workflow subsystems described above.
• Experience defining quality metrics and improving LLM or agent systems through evaluation frameworks.

Culture & Benefits

• AI-native, experimental approach to solving technical and business problems.
• Emphasis on challenging conventional thinking and accelerating innovation.
• Opportunity to work on enterprise-scale AI products including Snowflake Intelligence, Cortex Agents, and Cortex Search.