Senior Software Engineer, Snowflake

• 8+ years of experience designing and building scalable, distributed systems
• Strong programming skills in Java, Scala, or C++ with an emphasis on performance and reliability
• Deep understanding of distributed transaction processing, concurrency control, and high-performance query engines
• Experience with open-source data lake formats (e.g., Apache Iceberg, Parquet, Delta) and the challenges associated with multi-engine interoperability
• Experience building cloud-native services and working with public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, or GCP
• A passion for open-source software and community engagement, particularly in the data ecosystem
• Familiarity with data governance, security, and access control models in distributed data systems

Desirable

• As a Senior Software Engineer on the Polaris and Data Lake Catalog team, you’ll play a key role in building and evolving our open and interoperable data lake ecosystem
• You’ll work on some of the most complex and exciting challenges in distributed systems, contributing to Snowflake’s mission of providing a truly open data lake architecture, free from vendor lock-in
• Design and implement scalable, distributed systems to enable support for Iceberg DML/DDL transactions, schema evolution, partitioning, time travel, and more
• Architect and build systems that integrate Snowflake queries with external Iceberg catalogs (e.g., AWS Glue, Databricks Unity) and various data lake architectures, enabling seamless interoperability across cloud providers
• Develop high-performance, low-latency solutions for catalog federation, allowing customers to manage and query their data lake assets across multiple catalogs from a single interface
• Collaborate with Snowflake’s open-source team and the Apache Iceberg community to contribute new features and enhance the Iceberg REST specification
• Work on core data access control and governance features for Polaris, including fine-grained permissions such as row-level security, column masking, and multi-cloud federated access control
• Contribute to our managed Polaris service, ensuring that external query engines like Spark and Trino can read from and write to Iceberg tables through Polaris in a way that’s decoupled from Snowflake’s core data platform
• Build tooling and services that automate data lake table maintenance, including compaction, clustering, and data retention for enhanced query performance and efficiency