Senior Director of Engineering – Horizon Catalog, Collaboration & Marketplace
Snowflake · Menlo Park, United States · 8h ago
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.
Snowflake makes enterprise AI and data simple, secure, and scalable. Thousands of organizations worldwide rely on Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud to store, query, govern, and build intelligent applications on their most critical assets. As enterprises scale their data footprints and deploy autonomous AI agents, having high-quality, trusted, easily administered, and well-governed data has become foundational to enterprise survival and growth.
We are seeking an engineering executive to serve as the Senior Director of Engineering for Horizon Catalog, Collaboration (Data Sharing, Native Apps, Zero Copy, Data Clean Rooms), and Snowflake Marketplace.
This team brings together two pillars of the AI Data Cloud: Snowflake Horizon, the native governance, catalog, quality, and privacy engine, and Collaboration & Marketplace, the platforms that let organizations securely share, distribute, and monetize data, applications, and AI products. This engineering leadership role sits at a unique intersection: building planet-scale backend distributed systems while bringing deep product sensibility to the enterprise admin and data steward experience.
In this role, you will lead an engineering organization responsible for:
1. Horizon Catalog & Metadata: Building agentic experiences for exploring/understanding all the data estate and expressing governance intent, governance capabilities like data-quality monitoring and lineage tracking and integration with open standards (such as Apache Polaris / Iceberg REST catalog).
2. Collaboration & Marketplace: Building the sharing, application, and commerce platforms (Secure Data Sharing, Zero Copy, Native Apps, Data Clean Rooms, and Snowflake Marketplace) that connect providers and consumers across organizations, clouds, and regions.
3. Managing data context: Building capabilities like search and business ontology to help both humans and agents understand the semantics of their data.
What You Will Do
Lead a Mission-Critical Organization: Build, mentor, and inspire a world-class engineering organization including Engineering Directors, Senior Engineering Managers, and Principal Engineers across multiple hubs.
Bridge Engineering Depth with Product Intuition: Combine world-class distributed systems engineering with sharp product understanding ensuring the capabilities your team builds are technically resilient, economically efficient, and intuitively packaged for the enterprise administrator and data engineer.
Build Next-Gen Data Quality Systems: Spearhead the architecture for native data quality monitoring, automated data profiling, schema validation, and real-time alerts that catch data corruption or drift before it impacts downstream BI dashboards or AI models.
Power Enterprise Administration & Control: Architect administrative tooling, tenant management control planes, and centralized policy orchestration that make managing Snowflake across hundreds of accounts and global regions simple and foolproof.
Scale Collaboration & Marketplace: Lead the platforms behind secure data sharing, zero-copy partner integrations, Data Clean Rooms, and Snowflake Marketplace, the network that lets thousands of organizations share and monetize data, applications, and AI products across clouds and regions.
Drive Cross-Functional Alignment: Collaborate closely with Product Management (PM), Design, and Security leaders to translate enterprise customer pain points into high-velocity execution roadmaps.
Customer & Operational Leadership: Serve as an executive sponsor for tier-1 enterprise customers; champion operational excellence, security-by-design, and 99.99%+ availability across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
Qualifications
Experience: 15+ years of software engineering experience in product infrastructure, distributed systems, or enterprise cloud platforms, including 7+ years managing engineering directors, managers, and senior leaders across multi-team organizations.
Product-Minded Engineering Leadership: Strong technical product acumen: you don't just build infrastructure in a vacuum. You deeply understand customer workflows, the enterprise admin persona, usability, and how technical architecture drives product adoption.
Distributed Systems at Scale: Strong foundation in cloud-native distributed systems, high-throughput metadata storage, query execution, caching layers, and cross-region replication.
Organizational Excellence: Proven ability to attract, hire, retain, and develop elite engineering talent; adept at fostering an inclusive, high-ownership engineering culture.
Executive Communication: Exceptional ability to articulate complex technical architectures, trade-offs, and product strategies to VP/C-level leaders and enterprise customers.
Education: B.S., M.S., or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
Preferred Qualifications
Data Governance Depth: Prior experience with data governance frameworks, metadata management, automated lineage tracking, data classification (PII), or data masking/privacy controls.
Experience building or operating open lakehouse catalog engines (Apache Iceberg, Apache Polaris, Unity Catalog, or Hive Metastore).
Experience with secure data sharing, privacy-preserving collaboration (data clean rooms), application distribution platforms, or data/app marketplaces and commerce systems.
Experience architecting systems deployed natively across multiple public clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP).
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