Senior Software Engineer - Observe by Snowflake, Logs

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. Observe by Snowflake is an AI-powered observability platform built on the Snowflake AI Data Cloud and engineered for scale. We ingest and store logs, metrics, traces, and events on an open, scalable data lakehouse, using open formats like Apache Iceberg, at dramatically lower cost. A dynamic Context Graph and chat-based AI SRE provide rich context and automated workflows so teams can move from detection to root cause of production issue and resolution 10x faster. Leading engineering teams at companies like Capital One, Topgolf, and Dialpad rely on Observe to troubleshoot hundreds of terabytes of telemetry daily while maintaining reliability at enterprise scale. As part of Snowflake, Observe combines startup-style ownership and velocity with the global reach, operational excellence, and ecosystem of one of the world’s leading data platforms. IN THIS ROLE YOU WILL: - Lead the backend architecture and delivery of the Logs product area by owning the full lifecycle from API design through production reliability, with a strong sense of what makes a great end-user experience. - Drive technical direction for log ingestion, storage, querying, and enrichment pipelines capable of handling hundreds of terabytes of telemetry daily. - Build for both humans and AI agents — design APIs and workflows that work equally well for UI users and programmatic access by AI coding agents like Claude Code and Cursor. - Partner deeply with PMs, Frontend, and Design to shape the product roadmap, translate user needs into sound technical designs, and identify backend capabilities that unlock high-value product experiences. - Champion product thinking on the engineering team — bring clarity to trade-offs, flag gaps in requirements, and proactively surface opportunities to simplify or improve the product. - Set the technical bar through code reviews, architecture reviews, and mentorship, establishing patterns that scale across the broader backend organization. - Champion the use of AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor) to maintain high code quality and accelerate delivery. QUALIFICATIONS: - 7+ years of industry experience building and maintaining high-scale backend systems in production. - Strong proficiency in Go, Java, or a comparable systems-oriented language; comfort working across the stack when needed. - Deep experience designing and operating distributed systems — familiarity with streaming pipelines, columnar storage, or log/event processing is a strong plus. - Demonstrated product acumen: you can read a PRD critically, push back on requirements that don't serve users, and propose simpler solutions without sacrificing outcomes. - Track record of leading end-to-end feature delivery in close partnership with cross-functional teams (PM, Design, Frontend). - Strong written and verbal communication — you can explain technical decisions to non-engineers and influence roadmap priorities with data and reasoning. BONUS POINTS: - Experience building observability or log management systems (e.g., Splunk, Datadog, Elastic, Loki, OpenTelemetry). - Experience operating data lakehouses under high performance and high scale. - Experience with query DSLs, CEL, or similar expression evaluation frameworks. - Prior experience in a tech lead or staff engin