Principal Software Engineer - PostgreSQL

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 is about empowering enterprises to achieve their full potential — and people too. With a culture that’s all in on impact, innovation, and collaboration, Snowflake is the sweet spot for building big, moving fast, and taking technology — and careers — to the next level. Snowflake is reimagining what a modern Postgres experience can be. The Snowflake Postgres team is building a fully managed, cloud-native Postgres service that delivers the reliability, performance, and scale developers expect that is paired with a data experience that seamlessly ties into Snowflake. As a Principal Engineer, you'll help define the architecture, push the boundaries of Postgres in the cloud, and shape one of Snowflake's most strategic new products. AS A PRINCIPAL SOFTWARE ENGINEER AT SNOWFLAKE YOU WILL: - Serve as the technical leader on our most critical, cross-functional projects. - Break problems down and build consensus across multiple parties to reach solutions that are scalable, tractable, and timely. - Function as both a problem solver and a problem finder by building the roadmap while delivering it. - Leverage your experience to balance long-term thinking with more immediate business needs. - Understand trade-offs between consistency, performance, scaling limits, and costs to build solutions which can meet the demands of rapidly growing services. - Ensure operational readiness of the services and meet the commitments to our customers regarding durability, availability, performance, and security. - Solve real business needs at large scale by applying your software engineering and analytical problem solving skills. OUR IDEAL PRINCIPAL SOFTWARE ENGINEER WILL HAVE: - 10+ years building and operating large-scale distributed systems, databases, or cloud services. - Appreciation of Postgres. You have worked with Postgres as an end user or administrator. You have a solid understanding of database fundamentals. - Strong systems programming experience (Ruby experience a strong plus). - Experience building high-availability, multi-tenant, or highly distributed data systems. - Comfortable navigating large, complex codebases and leading cross-team architecture efforts. - A track record of driving projects from concept to production with measurable impact. - Excellent communication skills and the ability to influence across engineering and product organizations. - Passion for making Postgres better, simpler, and more powerful for developers everywhere. WHY JOIN THE ENGINEERING TEAM AT SNOWFLAKE? - Build an industry-leading Cloud Data and AI Platform. - Solve challenging technical problems related to security, parallel and distributed systems, programming, resource management, large-scale system maintenance, and more! - Work closely with our customers & partners, understand their use cases & needs, think strategically to seek the right problem to solve at the right time, and innovate with rigor. - Join a world-class team of both industry veterans and rising stars. 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 secu