Staff Software Engineer – Engineering Systems, Continuous Integration Team
Snowflake · United States · 6h 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.
We're hiring a Staff Software Engineer to help us build a world-class developer platform that fuels the Snowflake Data Cloud. As an engineer on the Continuous Integration team within Engineering Systems (ES), you will set the technical direction for and deliver the CI service that powers Snowflake's repositories and developer ecosystem.
Together with industry-wide experts in distributed systems, cross-cloud development, and engineering excellence, you will evolve our developer infrastructure and tooling to be elastic, large-scale, and highly performant — with simplicity at its core.
As a Staff Engineer on the CI team, you will help Snowflake realize its mission of becoming the premier Data Cloud by accelerating the delivery of high-quality software to production. You will set the technical standard for the team, drive architectural decisions, mentor engineers across the organization, and partner with product and engineering leadership to chart the quarterly and long-term roadmaps. You will ensure the team executes toward serving the current needs of its customers while staying ahead of technological trends and future demands.
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AS A STAFF SOFTWARE ENGINEER — CI, YOU WILL:
- Own the technical direction and architecture of Snowflake's CI platform — designing systems that scale reliably across thousands of developers, millions of builds, and a rapidly growing multi-repository codebase
- Lead the design and implementation of distributed CI services that are elastic, performant, and fault-tolerant across cloud providers
- Drive the CI platform strategy — partner with product managers and engineering leadership to define quarterly and long-term roadmaps that balance customer needs with technical innovation
- Set the engineering bar for the team through code reviews, design reviews, and architectural guidance — ensuring the CI platform is built with the quality and rigor expected of enterprise-grade infrastructure
- Identify and resolve systemic technical challenges — from build performance and resource efficiency to multi-tenant isolation, reliability, and security
- Mentor and develop engineers on the team — elevate technical judgment, design quality, and engineering craftsmanship across the group
- Stay ahead of the curve — evaluate and adopt emerging CI/CD technologies, tooling patterns, and industry best practices to keep Snowflake's developer platform at the leading edge
- Be a key stakeholder in cross-team initiatives that affect developer productivity — collaborating with adjacent ES teams and engineering leadership to shape the broader developer experience
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OUR IDEAL STAFF SOFTWARE ENGINEER WILL HAVE:
Required:
- 8+ years of industry experience designing and building distributed systems at scale
- A track record of technical leadership — owning system architecture, driving design decisions, and raising the technical bar for a team or organization
- Deep experience with enterprise-grade Continuous Integration for cloud-based distributed systems — you've built, scaled, or significantly evolved CI infrastructure at a comparable scale
- Strong passion for making developers highly productive — you think about developer experience as a product and are energized by making engineers faster and happier
- Excellent CS fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, distributed systems, and systems design
- Fluency in Java, C++, Python, or Go — with the versatility to work across languages and systems
- A strategic mindset — strong sense of what to prioritize for maximum impact and the ability to translate strategy into executable technical plans
- Ability to mentor and influence — you elevate engineers around you through code reviews, design guidance, and technical mentorship
- Excellent communication skills — both written and verbal — with the ability to articulate technical tradeoffs clearly to engineering and leadership audiences
Preferred:
- Experience developing data systems or distributed systems internals
- Hands-on experience with Jenkins, Bazel, ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, or other CI/CD suites at scale
- Experience designing multi-tenant systems with focus on reliability, performance, isolation, and security
- Proven experience authoring roadmap documents, technical design docs, project plans, and RCAs
- Experience with build system optimization — caching strategies, parallelization, incremental builds, and resource scheduling
- Background in developer tooling or platform engineering organizations
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SNOWFLAKE VALUES WE'RE LOOKING FOR:
- Get It Done — You ship high-quality systems at pace. You don't just design — you build, debug, and deliver.
- Own It — You treat the CI platform as your own. You anticipate where it will break at 10x scale and fix it before it does.
- Make Each Other the Best — You raise the bar for everyone around you. Code reviews, design feedback, and mentorship aren't side activities — they're core to how you work.
- Think Big — You see CI infrastructure as a strategic lever for Snowflake's engineering velocity, not just a build system. You design for the future.
COMPENSATION
Snowflake is committed to pay equity and transparency. Actual compensation will be determined based on factors including relevant experience, skills, location, and internal equity.
Base Salary Range - Total Target Compensation
$236,000 – $354,000 - $271,400 – $407,100
In addition to base salary and bonus (15% target), this role is eligible for equity in the form of RSUs ($600,000 – $1,800,000 range) and a comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, vision, 401(k), ESPP, generous PTO, and more.
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WHY ENGINEERING SYSTEMS AT SNOWFLAKE?
- Build infrastructure that thousands of engineers depend on every day — your work directly multiplies the productivity of Snowflake's entire engineering organization
- Operate at serious scale — millions of builds, thousands of developers, a multi-cloud codebase growing rapidly
- Technical depth and autonomy — you'll own architecture decisions on critical infrastructure with real impact
- Work with exceptional engineers — the ES team includes industry experts in distributed systems, build infrastructure, and developer tooling from Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and beyond
- Competitive compensation and meaningful equity in one of the most important enterprise technology companies in the world
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 an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.
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