Staff Software Engineer - Ingestion

Job description

At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise. To usher in this new era, we seek AI-native thinkers across every function who are energized by the opportunity to reinvent how they work. You don’t just use tools; you possess an innate curiosity, treating AI as a high-trust collaborator that is core to how you solve problems and accelerate your impact. We look for low-ego individuals who thrive in dynamic and fast-moving environments and move with an experimental mindset — who rapidly test emerging capabilities to discover simpler, more powerful ways to deliver results. At Snowflake, your role isn't just to execute a function, but to help redefine the future of how work gets done. STAFF SOFTWARE ENGINEER – FILE INGESTION (CUSTOMER-FACING SERVICES) BUILD THE FUTURE OF THE AI DATA CLOUD Snowflake’s File Ingestion team owns the core engines behind COPY INTO and Snowpipe — the primary arteries landing customer data into the AI Data Cloud at hundreds of petabytes per quarter. We are expanding our core mission to build next-generation, external-facing ingestion services that directly expose file-ingest capabilities to external platforms, partner ecosystems, and customer applications. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will lead the architectural vision and execution for these mission-critical, customer-facing services. You will operate at the intersection of high-throughput distributed systems, API platform design, and direct customer feature delivery, defining how enterprise data seamlessly flows into Snowflake at global scale. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Drive Technical Vision & Architecture: Define the multi-year architecture and technical strategy for high-throughput, external-facing ingestion services and APIs across multi-cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP). - Deliver Customer-Facing Innovations: Lead the end-to-end execution of enterprise-grade external features, ensuring low-latency data landing, high availability, and seamless ecosystem integration (e.g., Snowpark Connect, partner connectors). - Set Technical Direction: Author foundational design documents, establish technical standards for reliability, security, and scalability, and lead high-stakes architectural reviews across engineering orgs. - Lead Cross-Functional Alignment: Partner closely with Principal Architects, Product Management, Security, and external developer platforms to translate customer requirements into resilient system architecture. - Elevate Engineering Excellence: Mentor and sponsor Senior, Mid-level, and Junior engineers; raise the bar for system design, code quality, testing methodologies, and operational maturity. - Direct Customer & Strategic Impact: Engage with enterprise customer engineering teams to solve complex integration challenges, debug production edge cases at scale, and turn direct customer feedback into core platform capabilities. WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR - 10+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems or cloud-native infrastructure in production. - Proven track record of architectural leadership, having successfully taken complex, customer-facing services or external APIs from initial concept to General Availability (GA) and global scale. - Expert proficiency in Java or C++ (strong preference for engineers comfortable working across both systems-level C++ and managed service Java frameworks). - Deep expertise in external API design, cloud service orchestration, and building resilient, multi-tenant customer-facing endpoints. - Deep domain knowledge in at least one of the following: high-throughput ingestion pipelines, distributed query execution engines, messaging/streaming systems (e.g., Kafka, Pulsar), or database internals. - Exceptional written and verbal communication skills with a demonstrated ability to drive technical consensus across cross-functional leadership, product partners, and external technical stakeholders. - BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience. BONUS POINTS - Experience building and scaling external developer platforms, SDKs, or public SaaS APIs serving external consumers. - Deep expertise with open table formats (Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake) and integration with ecosystems like Apache Spark or Ray. - Advanced performance engineering expertise: memory management, SIMD, vectorization, lock-free data structures, or I/O optimization at PB-scale. - Strong background in metadata management, transactional state machines, or consensus protocols (e.g., Raft, Paxos). - Active contributor to open-source data infrastructure, cloud-native compute systems, or query engines. WHY THIS TEAM - Massive Strategic Impact: You will lead the expansion of Snowflake's most critical data-path surface into direct, customer-facing integrations that unlock new platform ecosystems and drive platform volume. - Broad Architectural Scope: Your work will bridge edge API lay