SnowCAT Technical Principal
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.
About this Position
We are looking for a senior leader in the cloud data platform space to join our team and help shape some of the most cutting edge features at Snowflake! This individual will work collaboratively and hands-on with Product Management and Engineering to accelerate customers adopting our most challenging features and architectures. We are looking for an experienced professional capable of both applying their past experiences to new architectures and using their aptitude to learn the next new wave of technologies that can benefit customers on the Snowflake Data Cloud.
This position will be a part of the SnowCAT team (Customer Acceleration Team) within the product organization. SnowCAT is a group that brings deep experience with database, application, container, machine learning, and AI technologies to investigate the newest, most demanding customer scenarios and validate emerging features and capabilities in the Snowflake product. SnowCAT team members work closely with product managers, engineering leaders, and a variety of field organizations and customers to turn today’s ‘bleeding edge’ into tomorrow’s mainstream.
As Technical Principal on the SnowCAT team you will:
Impact Snowflake’s product success in multiple market segments and workloads.
Engage with PM and Engineering across multiple feature areas.
Engage with customer CTO’s and senior business/technical leaders to deploy, prove, evaluate, and advise on new Snowflake capabilities.
Create and advocate for new technical architectures, often backed by sample code.
Dig into selected competing cloud data platform products to evaluate their newest features and best practices and compare them against Snowflake’s capabilities.
Analyze Snowflake telemetry and understand Snowflake’s internals to investigate the root cause for feature behavior, both desired and undesired.
Communicate findings and recommendations effectively and persuasively to Product Management and Engineering leaders.
Partner with various Marketing teams to position Snowflake’s feature advantages to technical field organizations and customers.
Own and execute on multiple, concurrent SnowCAT projects, maintaining a thorough written record of progress.
Our ideal Technical Principal will have:
Proven expertise as leader or senior contributor in a data-centric software or services team.
Deep familiarity with distributed database architectures, query processing and the drivers of performance.
Comfort integrating diverse tooling on cloud platforms including AWS, Azure and GCP.
Curiosity and motivation to work with a variety of distributed computing / database platforms in the cloud and understand strengths & weaknesses impacting performance
Deep experience with a variety of database-centric workloads including analytic queries, data engineering / ETL, machine learning, streaming data / IOT, and transaction processing.
Expert SQL skills and strong experience in other programming languages/frameworks adjacent to Snowflake, including but not limited to Python, Java, Javascript, Scala, etc.
Experience with agents/LLMs, containerized services, data intensive applications, and/or machine learning model development.
Strong vibe coding skills to build synthetic workloads and prototypes to stress platforms and features.
Excellent communication skills in presenting to technical audiences inside and outside the company.
An ability to thrive in the dynamic environment that comes with being part of a hyper-growth company. That means flexibility and willingness to jump in and do whatever it takes to be successful.
Proven expertise in understanding the voice of the customer and partnering across engineering, marketing, and sales to deliver compelling products that meet those customers’ needs.
20+ years of experience in a technical role for data-centric software or services -- testing and tuning products, implementing complex solutions with customers, product management, or benchmarking.
Snowflake is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, color, gender identity or expression, marital status, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, race, religion, pregnancy, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances.
Every Snowflake employee is expected to follow the company’s confidentiality and security standards for handling sensitive data. Snowflake employees must abide by the company’s data security plan as an essential part of their duties. It is every employee's duty to keep customer information secure and confidential.
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?
For jobs located in the United States, please visit the job posting on the Snowflake Careers Site for salary and benefits information: careers.snowflake.com