Senior Software Engineer - Observe by Snowflake, Metrics Platform

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. THE ROLE You will work on our Metrics platform - enabling our users to query, visualize, and alert on billions of time series quickly and effectively. You'll own meaningful parts of that stack, drive performance and scalability improvements, and contribute to architectural decisions that shape where the platform goes next. This isn't a maintenance role, the metrics backend is being actively evolved, and you'll be a core part of that. This is a high-ownership, high-impact role. You'll be working on problems that matter immediately for customers experiencing performance pain today, while also contributing to the architectural foundations the next generation of the platform depends on. You'll excel here if you're equally comfortable doing rigorous analysis across large-scale production workloads and getting into the details of a specific system change to make it land correctly. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own and improve components of the metrics pipeline, ingestion, storage, query execution, caching, and numerous optimizations across the stack, based on where you can have the most impact - Contribute to the design of next-generation metrics systems, ensuring current and future work can proceed in parallel - Design and run experiments to validate architectural changes before full implementation, iterating quickly to find the best path - Investigate and resolve customer-reported performance issues in the metrics domain, including acting as a first responder when metrics latency becomes a blocker for deals or retention - Collaborate with the broader Metrics team on cross-cutting concerns, query execution, caching, and pipeline architecture, where metrics work intersects. QUALIFICATIONS - 5+ years of industry experience building backend distributed systems - Hands-on experience building and optimizing data pipelines, query engines, or storage systems - Strong foundations in algorithms, data structures, and distributed systems architecture - Ability to rapidly onboard to complex, unfamiliar systems and drive meaningful improvements without needing a long ramp - Customer-focused mindset: able to connect backend engineering decisions to real user pain and prioritize accordingly - Strong communication skills for working across engineering, product, and customer-facing teams NICE TO HAVE - Experience with time-series databases (Prometheus, InfluxDB, TimescaleDB, or similar) - Experience with Snowflake or other cloud dat