Principal Software Engineer 2 - OLTP
US-CA-Menlo Park · US-WA-Bellevue · 15+ years experience · Full-time · Hybrid · Posted Oct 6, 2026
At a glance
- Experience
- 15+ years experience
- Employment
- Full-time
- Workplace
- Hybrid
- Location
- US-CA-Menlo Park · US-WA-Bellevue
About the role
- Snowflake is seeking a Principal Software Engineer 2 to help define and drive the architecture across database internals, storage, compute, and cloud infrastructure for OLTP systems.
- The role involves designing transactional systems for agent-driven workloads, combining operational database performance with Snowflake's cloud-native architecture.
- You will lead major architectural decisions and complex, cross-organizational engineering efforts across Snowflake Postgres and Unistore.
Responsibilities
- Define and drive the long-term technical architecture for OLTP across Snowflake Postgres, Unistore and the infrastructure they depend on.
- Lead major architectural decisions across transactions, storage, concurrency control, replication, recovery, query execution and database scalability.
- Shape the compute and storage architecture for low-latency, highly available transactional systems, including resource isolation, elasticity, networking, caching and container infrastructure.
- Build database primitives for agent-driven workloads, including fast creation of isolated transactional environments, checkpointing and rollback, and efficient lifecycle management.
- Define how agents safely read and modify operational state, with strong guarantees around consistency, recovery, access control and governance.
- Determine where PostgreSQL architecture and compatibility provide leverage and where alternative approaches can deliver meaningful advantages.
- Design for workloads where databases and transactional environments are created and operated programmatically at machine speed rather than primarily through human administration.
- Lead complex, cross-organizational engineering efforts and establish technical direction across multiple teams.
- Work closely with product leaders, senior engineering leadership, and strategic customers on the most important technical and product decisions.
- Raise the technical bar through architecture reviews, mentoring and hands-on leadership on the hardest systems problems.
Requirements
- 15+ years of experience building databases, distributed systems, storage systems or large-scale cloud infrastructure, with sustained impact at significant technical scope.
- Deep expertise in OLTP and database systems, including areas such as transactions, concurrency control, storage engines, indexing, query processing, replication, recovery and high availability.
- Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure for low-latency stateful systems, including compute, storage, networking, resource isolation and failure handling.
- Experience designing highly elastic, multi-tenant, or rapidly provisioned stateful systems where isolation and efficient lifecycle management are first-class concerns.
- Strong instincts for how database architecture should evolve for AI-native applications and autonomous agents, including ephemeral state, sandboxing, safe transactional actions and programmatic database lifecycle.
- Experience making difficult architectural tradeoffs across latency, throughput, consistency, availability, durability, scalability, isolation and cost.
- A track record of taking technically ambitious systems from architecture through production at meaningful scale.
- Experience influencing technical direction across multiple teams or a broad product area.
- Strong systems engineering instincts and the ability to work across abstractions, from database internals to distributed infrastructure.
- Exceptional technical judgment and communication skills, including the ability to influence engineers, executives and customers.
Preferred qualifications
- Deep PostgreSQL expertise is a strong advantage, but experience building other sophisticated transactional or distributed database systems is equally relevant.
- Strong systems programming experience; C, C++, or Rust experience is a plus.
Skills
- PostgreSQL
- C
- C++
- Rust
- Distributed Systems
- Storage Systems
- OLTP
- Cloud Infrastructure
