Senior/Staff Software Engineer - Machine Learning Platform (Inference)

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. Build the future of data. Join the Snowflake team. The Snowflake Machine Learning Platform team’s mission is to enable customers to bring their machine learning and deep learning workloads to Snowflake. Our customers want to build powerful models with the ever-increasing data in Snowflake but face several challenges including infrastructure optimizations, orchestration, performance, and security. The team aims to solve these challenges by building highly integrated platform solutions that are simple, secure, and enable end-to-end ML workflows. We are on an early journey to build the most scalable machine learning and data platform without sacrificing the benefits of a single platform and governance. We are looking for outstanding technical leaders who will join our ML Platform team to build the next-generation platform and play a pivotal role in this journey by understanding Snowflake’s core platform architecture and evolving it to enable state-of-the-art machine learning and LLM workloads. Join us to define strategies, set technical directions, design and execute, engage and deliver innovation, and unlock the power of AI for thousands of enterprise customers. This position is based in Menlo Park, CA, and Bellevue, WA. RESPONSIBILITIES: - Help define and own the roadmap, working collaboratively and proactively with senior architects, PMs, and team leadership. The initiatives include platforms and tools that enable customers to do state-of-the-art machine learning on Snowflake natively. - Collaboratively build and execute a vision for incorporating new advances in machine learning in ways that best achieve the team’s business objectives. - Ensure operational excellence of the services and meet the commitments to our customers regarding reliability, availability, and performance. - Collaborate across other ML partner teams to continuously improve ML development velocity and capabilities at Snowflake. - Support team members in delivering a high level of technical quality. IDEAL REQUIREMENTS & QUALIFICATIONS: - Have 7+ years of industry experience designing, building, and supporting Internet serving infrastructure, machine learning platforms, machine learning services, and frameworks. - Strong track record of working with machine learning systems and/or platforms. - Experience in serving LLMs using inference engines like vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, TEI, SGLang, and knowing tradeoffs between them. - Experience serving fine-tuned LLMs (PEFT, DPO, RL). - Experience with several of the following frameworks: SKLearn, XGBoost, PyTorch, Tensorflow, MLflow is a plus. - Previous experience in building batch and real-time ML serving systems preferred. - Have built a roadmap and vision around machine learning teams, and led technical decision making with help of architects and PMs and team. - BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or related majors, or equivalent experience 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 g