Staff Software Engineer - Ingestion

US-WA-Bellevue · 10+ years experience · Full-time · Hybrid · Posted Oct 13, 2026

At a glance

Snowflake is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the File Ingestion team to lead the architectural vision and execution for next-generation, external-facing ingestion services.
This role operates at the intersection of high-throughput distributed systems, API platform design, and direct customer feature delivery, defining how enterprise data flows into Snowflake at global scale.

Drive Technical Vision & Architecture: Define the multi-year architecture and technical strategy for high-throughput, external-facing ingestion services and APIs across multi-cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP).
Deliver Customer-Facing Innovations: Lead the end-to-end execution of enterprise-grade external features, ensuring low-latency data landing, high availability, and seamless ecosystem integration.
Set Technical Direction: Author foundational design documents, establish technical standards for reliability, security, and scalability, and lead high-stakes architectural reviews across engineering orgs.
Lead Cross-Functional Alignment: Partner closely with Principal Architects, Product Management, Security, and external developer platforms to translate customer requirements into resilient system architecture.
Elevate Engineering Excellence: Mentor and sponsor Senior, Mid-level, and Junior engineers; raise the bar for system design, code quality, testing methodologies, and operational maturity.
Direct Customer & Strategic Impact: Engage with enterprise customer engineering teams to solve complex integration challenges, debug production edge cases at scale, and turn direct customer feedback into core platform capabilities.

10+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems or cloud-native infrastructure in production.
Proven track record of architectural leadership, having successfully taken complex, customer-facing services or external APIs from initial concept to General Availability (GA) and global scale.
Expert proficiency in Java or C++ (strong preference for engineers comfortable working across both systems-level C++ and managed service Java frameworks).
Deep expertise in external API design, cloud service orchestration, and building resilient, multi-tenant customer-facing endpoints.
Deep domain knowledge in at least one of the following: high-throughput ingestion pipelines, distributed query execution engines, messaging/streaming systems (e.g., Kafka, Pulsar), or database internals.
Exceptional written and verbal communication skills with a demonstrated ability to drive technical consensus across cross-functional leadership, product partners, and external technical stakeholders.
BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Experience building and scaling external developer platforms, SDKs, or public SaaS APIs serving external consumers.
Deep expertise with open table formats (Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake) and integration with ecosystems like Apache Spark or Ray.
Advanced performance engineering expertise: memory management, SIMD, vectorization, lock-free data structures, or I/O optimization at PB-scale.
Strong background in metadata management, transactional state machines, or consensus protocols (e.g., Raft, Paxos).
Active contributor to open-source data infrastructure, cloud-native compute systems, or query engines.