Staff Software Engineer - Metadata

About the role

Company Pitch

Snowflake is the AI Data Cloud. Thousands of organizations run their most critical data, analytics, and AI workloads on our platform. We built Snowflake for the cloud from day one: near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance. Our goal is to make every organization's data instantly useful and always available.

Team Pitch

The Metadata team owns the brain of Snowflake. Every query, table, transaction, and permission depends on the metadata layer we build. Our systems handle millions of metadata operations per second. We also power cross-region and cross-cloud replication and failover, keeping customer data available through outages. If you want hard distributed-systems problems with direct customer impact, this is the team.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design of core metadata and replication systems across multiple teams.
• Set technical direction for scalability, consistency, and fault tolerance of the metadata layer.
• Drive cross-region and cross-cloud replication toward lower RPO and higher reliability.
• Solve hard problems in performance, availability, and correctness at global scale.
• Partner with Product and architects to turn customer needs into durable designs.
• Raise the operational bar through observability, safe rollouts, and blast-radius controls.
• Mentor senior engineers and grow technical leaders on the team.

Core Requirements

• 10+ years building large-scale distributed systems or database internals.
• Strong development skills in Java or C++.
• Proven record leading multi-team technical initiatives from design to production.
• Deep understanding of consistency, transactions, and fault tolerance.
• BS/MS in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience.

Any of the following would make you a stronger candidate

• Experience with FoundationDB or other distributed key-value stores.
• Experience building replication, disaster recovery, or geo-distributed systems.
• Experience with database metadata, catalogs, or query compilation.
• Experience running services on AWS, Azure, or GCP.

Additional information

Snowflake is growing fast, and we’re scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth. We are looking for people who share our values, challenge ordinary thinking, and push the pace of innovation while building a future for themselves and Snowflake.

How do you want to make your impact?