Senior Software Engineer, AI Platform for User Experiences

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. IN THIS ROLE YOU WILL: * Lead the backend architecture and delivery of the Logs product area by owning the full lifecycle from API design through production reliability, with a strong sense of what makes a great end-user experience. * Drive technical direction for log ingestion, storage, querying, and enrichment pipelines capable of handling hundreds of terabytes of telemetry daily. * Build for both humans and AI agents — design APIs and workflows that work equally well for UI users and programmatic access by AI coding agents like Claude Code and Cursor. * Partner deeply with PMs, Frontend, and Design to shape the product roadmap, translate user needs into sound technical designs, and identify backend capabilities that unlock high-value product experiences. * Champion product thinking on the engineering team — bring clarity to trade-offs, flag gaps in requirements, and proactively surface opportunities to simplify or improve the product. * Set the technical bar through code reviews, architecture reviews, and mentorship, establishing patterns that scale across the broader backend organization. * Champion the use of AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor) to maintain high code quality and accelerate delivery. QUALIFICATIONS: * 7+ years of industry experience building and maintaining high-scale backend systems in production. * Strong proficiency in Go, Java, or a comparable systems-oriented language; comfort working across the stack when needed. * Deep experience designing and operating distributed systems — familiarity with streaming pipelines, columnar storage, or log/event processing is a strong plus. * Demonstrated product acumen: you can read a PRD critically, push back on requirements that don't serve users, and propose simpler solutions without sacrificing outcomes. * Track record of leading end-to-end feature delivery in close partnership with cross-functional teams (PM, Design, Frontend). * Strong written and verbal communication — you can explain technical decisions to non-engineers and influence roadmap priorities with data and reasoning. BONUS POINTS: * Experience building observability or log management systems (e.g., Splunk, Datadog, Elastic, Loki, OpenTelemetry). * Experience operating data lakehouses under high performance and high scale. * Experience with query DSLs, CEL, or similar expression evaluation frameworks. * Prior experience in a tech lead or staff engineer capacity on a product-focused team. Every Snowflake employee is expected to follow the company’s confidentiality and security standards for handling sensitive data. Snowflake employees must abide by the company’s data security plan as an essential part of their duties. It is every employee’s duty to keep customer information secure and confidential. Snowflake is growing fast, and we’re scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth. We are looking for people who share our values, challenge ordinary thinking, and push the pace of innovation while building a future for themselves and Snowflake. How do you want to make your impact? For jobs located in the United States, please visit the job posting on the Snowflake Careers Site for salary and benefits information: careers.snowflake.com

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 engineered for scale — ingesting logs, metrics, traces, and events on an open data lakehouse using Apache Iceberg, at dramatically lower cost than traditional tools. Our products help engineering teams at companies like Capital One, Topgolf, and Dialpad move from detection to root cause 10x faster across hundreds of terabytes of telemetry data daily. As part of Snowflake, we combine startup-style ownership and velocity with the reach and ecosystem of one of the world's leading data platforms. We are hiring a Senior Software Engineer to own and drive the evolution of our APM and AI observability products — two adjacent product lines that sit at the intersection of AI, advanced streaming data pipelines, and backend platform engineering. AS A SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER AT SNOWFLAKE, YOU WILL: * Own end-to-end product scopes across our APM and AI observability product lines — from backend behavior and API design to data pipeline architecture and client-side SDK work * Build and optimize streaming data pipelines that tackle graph traversal challenges at scale and LLM-as-judge online evaluation pipelines for real-time agentic telemetry * Design and implement backend services and APIs that power microservice topology views, service error detection, latency analysis, and agentic workflow monitoring * Collaborate cross-functionally with frontend, design, product, and support teams to deliver products that are intuitive for both human users and AI-native workflows (agentic users like Claude Code and Cursor are first-class citizens on our platform) * Drive architecture and delivery for medium-to-large projects end-to-end, from technical design through production launch * Champion product thinking on the engineering team — deeply understand customer use cases in both microservice and agentic application contexts before diving into technical solutions * Mentor junior engineers and lead technical design decisions that raise the quality bar across the team OUR IDEAL SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER WILL HAVE: * BS in Computer Science or equivalent and solid computer science fundamentals (algorithms, systems, distributed computing) * 5+ years of backend development experience with strong programming and debugging skills * Experience working with complex data pipelines and/or data warehouses at production scale * Demonstrated product mindset — you seek to understand user motivation and use cases before diving into implementation * Experience owning and driving medium-sized projects successfully, including architecture and cross-team delivery * Strong communication and collaboration skills — you're effective working with engineering, product, design, and customer-facing teammates * Experience mentoring junior engineers or leading technical design discussions BONUS POINTS FOR THE FOLLOWING: * Experience building or working on APM or AI observability products (OpenTelemetry experience a strong plus) * Hands-on experience building or operating agentic applications in production * Exposure to customer-facing product development with strong product intuition * Experience with streaming systems, distributed tracing, or graph-based data pipelines * Prior experience in high-growth startups or fast-paced product environments where you shipped fast and owned outcomes WHY JOIN THE OBSERVE APM TEAM? Observe by Snowflake is where observability gets reinvented — not incrementally, but fundamentally. We're the only observability platform built natively on the Snowflake AI Data Cloud, which means we skip the compromises: no more choosing between cost and retention, no more fragmented tools for logs vs. traces vs. metrics. Engineering teams at some of the most demanding companies in the world rely on us to debug at scale, and we're just getting started. What makes this role unique is the intersection of problems you'll work on: streaming graph traversal at scale, agentic AI monitoring, and a product philosophy that treats AI-native workflows as first-class citizens. You'll have a real product scope to own, a team with startup velocity, and the full weight of Snowflake's platform, data, and go-to-market behind you. Every Snowflake employee is expected to follow the company’s confidentiality and security standards for handling sensitive data. Snowflake employees must abide by the company’s data security plan as an essential part of their duties. It is every employee’s duty to keep customer information secure and confidential. Snowflake is growing fast, and we’re scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth. We are looking for people who share our values, challenge ordinary thinking, and push the pace of innovation while building a future for themselves and Snowflake. How do you want to make your impact? For jobs located in the United States, please visit the job posting on the Snowflake Careers Site for salary and benefits information: careers.snowflake.com