Senior Software Engineer - Observe by Snowflake, Logs

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 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. We are hiring a Senior Software Engineer on the Observe team at Snowflake to own the streaming data product surface — the tables, views, and materialized views at the core of Observe's architecture. Observe's data lake approach lets customers correlate heterogeneous telemetry — logs, metrics, traces, events — across a unified data model. This role owns that data model: how customers define, shape, and query the semi-structured data that makes cross-signal correlation low-latency and cost-efficient, at petabyte scale, over continuous streaming telemetry. AS A SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER — STREAMING DATA PRODUCTS AT SNOWFLAKE, YOU WILL: * Own the data modeling product surface — the APIs, schemas, and abstractions through which customers create tables, views, and materialized views that unify their telemetry for correlation and querying, designed for high-performance execution at scale * Design the right abstractions for how customers create and manage queryable data — from streaming materialized views to reference tables to log-derived metrics — each serving different needs but composing under one coherent, evolvable model * Define freshness and staleness semantics that let customers trust their materialized views are current, and design the controls to tune the trade-off between query latency and compute cost * Design APIs with strong schema taste: versioning, backwards compatibility, polymorphic data models, and clean contracts between systems * Drive requirements and shape the execution engine based on what the product surface needs * Layer complexity so an SRE gets a useful table from opinionated defaults in minutes, while a data engineer can express multi-stage pipelines with custom joins, windowing, and time-based aggregations * Lead a team technically — setting architectural direction, writing production code, and mentoring engineers OUR IDEAL SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER — STREAMING DATA PRODUCTS WILL HAVE: * 5+ years of software engineering experience with deep expertise in databases, SQL, stream processing, or data pipeline systems * Deep knowledge of data processing or streaming internals — late-arriving data, backfill and reprocessing on schema changes, event-time vs. processing-time semantics — with experience building products and applications on top of them * Demonstrated experience designing and shipping APIs with strong taste in DB schema design, versioning, and developer ergonomics * An architect's mental model — you think in systems, interfaces, contracts, and long-term evolution rather than short-term hacks * A strong sense of user empathy and product intuition — you think beyond APIs and care about how customers define and query their data * Proficiency in Go or another systems language, with ability to write production-grade distributed systems code BONUS POINTS FOR THE FOLLOWING: * Experience building customer-facing data modeling or pipeline authoring products * Hands-on experience with streaming semantics in production: watermarks, windowing, ordering, delivery guarantees, late-arriving data * Background in designing or extending query languages, schema DSLs, or transformation DAG semantics * Prior work building internal data platforms that turned raw event streams into curated, queryable tables for internal teams * Familiarity with Apache Iceberg, open table formats, or data lakehouse architectures WHY JOIN OUR OBSERVE TEAM AT SNOWFLAKE? Observe's data modeling surface — how customers go from raw telemetry to structured, queryable, correlated data — has proven successful and is now at an inflection point, growing rapidly in richness and complexity to serve evolving enterprise needs. Your architectural decisions will shape how this surface scales — serving thousands of teams, supporting new abstraction types, and maintaining coherence as the platform matures. And you'll do it backed by Snowflake's query engine and data platform, with the ownership culture and shipping velocity of a small 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 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 Apache Iceberg — at dramatically lower cost. OpenTelemetry is the foundation of how customers send data to Observe, and we are making significant investment in upstream OTel contributions to ensure Observe is the best destination for OTel-instrumented environments. As a Senior Software Engineer on the OpenTelemetry team, you'll play a key role in driving Observe's open-source strategy within the OpenTelemetry ecosystem. You'll work on some of the most exciting challenges in telemetry collection and instrumentation — expanding coverage into emerging domains like LLM/AI observability and Browser RUM — while collaborating closely with the OTel community to shape the standards that the industry builds on. AS A SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER - OBSERVE BY SNOWFLAKE, OPENTELEMETRY, YOU WILL: * Pioneer new instrumentation capabilities in the OpenTelemetry community, defining and building next-generation telemetry collection for emerging domains including LLM/AI inference, Browser RUM, and mobile. * Design and implement OTel Collector components (receivers, processors, exporters) and SDK instrumentation libraries that strengthen Observe's position as a leading OTel destination. * Collaborate with the OpenTelemetry open-source community by contributing code, participating in SIG discussions, authoring RFCs, and reviewing pull requests to ensure high-quality contributions. * Architect and own the Observe Agent — our OTel Collector distribution — including its extension points, pipeline architecture, and release strategy. * Contribute to OpenTelemetry Semantic Conventions, helping define standardized telemetry schemas for new and evolving technology domains. * Work with product and field engineering teams to translate customer instrumentation challenges into upstream contributions and product features. * Represent Snowflake/Observe in the OTel community — present at conferences, build relationships with maintainers at other vendors, and drive consensus on specification decisions. OUR IDEAL SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER WILL HAVE: * 5+ years of software engineering experience with meaningful involvement in the OpenTelemetry ecosystem (Collector, SDKs, or instrumentation libraries). * Strong programming skills in Go (OTel Collector) and familiarity with at least one SDK language (Java, Python, JS/TS, or .NET). * Deep understanding of OTel's architecture: the Collector pipeline model, SDK internals, context propagation, and the semantic conventions specification process. * Experience contributing to open-source projects with multi-vendor governance — consensus-building, RFC authorship, and cross-organizational collaboration. * 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 observability and telemetry ecosystem. * Strong opinions on instrumentation design: what makes telemetry useful vs. noisy, and how to balance coverage with performance overhead. BONUS POINTS FOR EXPERIENCE WITH: * Approver or maintainer status in an OTel SIG (Collector, SDK, Semantic Conventions, or OpAMP). * LLM/AI observability instrumentation — tracing inference chains, token usage, model performance metrics. * Browser RUM or front-end performance instrumentation. * Designing and shipping an OTel Collector distribution or Kubernetes operator. WHY JOIN THE OPENTELEMETRY TEAM AT SNOWFLAKE? * Be part of Snowflake's strategic investment in open-source observability — shaping the standards the entire industry builds on. * Work on high-impact instrumentation challenges in emerging domains (LLM/AI, Browser RUM) where conventions don't yet exist and your contributions define the path forward. * Collaborate with core OTel maintainers and some of the brightest minds in the telemetry ecosystem, with the backing and scale of one of the world's leading data platforms. * Have a direct feedback loop between your upstream contributions and enterprise customers processing petabytes of OTel data daily through Observe. 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