Staff Software Engineer — Engineering Systems, Continuous Integration

Overview

Staff Software Engineer on the Continuous Integration team within Snowflake's Engineering Systems organization, defining the technical direction of CI infrastructure used by thousands of engineers.

What you'll do

• Own the technical direction and architecture of large-scale Continuous Integration services and infrastructure.
• Design, build, and operate distributed systems that support reliable, performant, and secure software delivery.
• Lead the development of CI capabilities that improve build reliability, test execution, developer productivity, and release velocity.
• Partner with engineering leadership, product managers, and teams across Snowflake to define quarterly and long-term technical roadmaps.
• Drive architectural decisions across build systems, test orchestration, resource scheduling, workflow execution, and developer tooling.
• Identify systemic bottlenecks in the software delivery lifecycle and develop solutions that improve engineering efficiency at scale.
• Establish high standards for design, code quality, testing, observability, reliability, and operational readiness.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, technical guidance, and collaborative problem-solving.
• Lead complex projects involving multiple teams and cross-functional dependencies.
• Participate in incident response, root-cause analysis, and long-term reliability improvements.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and industry practices to keep Snowflake's developer platform scalable and effective.

What you'll need

• 7+ years of industry experience designing and building production software systems.
• A track record of technical leadership across complex, multi-team engineering initiatives.
• Deep experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale.
• Experience building or significantly evolving enterprise-grade Continuous Integration or Continuous Delivery systems.
• Strong computer science fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, distributed systems, and systems design.
• Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Java, C++, Python, or Go.
• Experience making architectural decisions involving scalability, reliability, performance, security, and maintainability.
• A strong understanding of developer productivity and the software development lifecycle.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and sound technical judgment.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly.
• A collaborative mindset and a demonstrated ability to mentor and influence engineers across teams.

Nice to have

• Experience with CI/CD and build systems such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Bazel, ArgoCD, or comparable platforms.
• Experience with build optimization, caching, parallel execution, incremental builds, or distributed test scheduling.
• Experience designing multi-tenant systems with strong isolation, reliability, performance, and security requirements.
• Experience with Kubernetes, containers, or public cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Experience operating large-scale developer platforms or engineering infrastructure.
• Experience with observability, monitoring, alerting, and production operations.
• Experience authoring technical roadmaps, architecture documents, project plans, postmortems, and root-cause analyses.
• Experience working with data systems, distributed storage, or cloud-based services.
• A history of improving engineering practices and multiplying the effectiveness of teams.

Details

• Location: Bellevue, Washington, United States.
• Compensation for the US-Market 1 location band: base salary $236,000–$354,000 USD, target bonus 15%, total target compensation $271,400–$407,100 USD, with eligibility for an RSU grant.