Senior Software Engineer - Metadata

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 THE ROLE Every time a Snowflake query runs — and we're talking billions of queries a day — something has to know exactly where every byte of customer data lives, which version is current, and how to coordinate it all in milliseconds. That's the Metadata team. We're the layer that makes Snowflake's AI Data Cloud feel instant and interoperable at exabyte scale. No one sees us. Everyone depends on us. If you love hard distributed systems and database engine problems, care about correctness and performance, and want your work to power the world's most demanding data workloads, Agentic dataflows, and the AI applications being built on top of them. WHAT YOU'LL BUILD - Core metadata storage and retrieval systems that power Snowflake's catalog, lineage, and governance products - High-throughput, low-latency distributed services in a cloud-native environment - APIs and frameworks consumed by internal teams and external customers - Observability, reliability, and operational tooling for production metadata services - Scalable data models that evolve with Snowflake's rapidly growing feature surface WHAT WE LOOK FOR Required - 7+ years of experience in backend software engineering - Strong proficiency in Java, C++, Go, or similar systems-level languages - Experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale (high availability, fault tolerance, consistency tradeoffs) - Solid understanding of database internals, metadata management, or catalog systems - Proven ability to lead technical design across multiple engineers and drive features end-to-end - Strong communication skills — able to write clear design documents and present tradeoffs to stakeholders Preferred - Experience with data catalog, data governance, or schema registry systems - Familiarity with cloud infrastructure on AWS, Azure, or GCP - Prior work on multi-tenant SaaS platforms - Contributions to open-source projects in the metadata or data infrastructure space WHAT YOU'LL BRING - Ownership mindset — you take problems from ambiguity to production - Judgment on when to build vs. buy, and when to invest in platform vs. ship features - Mentorship instinct — you raise the technical bar of the engineers around you - Curiosity about the broader Snowflake ecosystem and how metadata enables every other product Snowflake's Metadata team is at the heart of the data cloud, building the systems that power object discovery, governance, lineage, and catalog capabilities across the platform. As a Senior Software Engineer on this team, you will design and implement highly scalable, distributed backend services that serve millions of metadata operations per day. You'll work closely with product, design, and partner engineering teams to shape the future of how users understand and manage their data assets. 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,