Senior Software Engineer - Cortex AI - FDE
Snowflake · US-CA-Menlo Park
About this role
At Snowflake, we’re powering the era of the **agentic enterprise**. We’re looking for **AI-native thinkers** who are energized by reinventing how work gets done—using AI as a high-trust collaborator and moving with an experimental mindset. The **Cortex Apps** team is building the future of AI for enterprise data. This role focuses on the **backend infrastructure** that powers flagship products like **Snowflake Intelligence**, **Cortex Agents**, and **Search**—making agentic AI **fast, reliable, scalable, and secure** at the enterprise level. You won’t just use AI tools—you’ll build the high-performance systems that orchestrate them. You’ll help own and influence the architecture for: - **Agent execution environments** - **High-throughput context retrieval** - The ecosystem that enables customers to **iterate and launch agents in production** --- ## What you will do - **Architect Agentic Runtimes**: Build and scale orchestration engines for complex agentic workflows, ensuring **low-latency tool execution** and **robust state management**. - **Scale Context Engineering Infra**: Design high-performance **RAG** systems, including vector database integration, scalable search indexing, query processing & ranking, semantic caching, and automated metadata extraction. - **Build the “Evals Engine”**: Develop infrastructure for massive-scale golden set simulations, error analysis pipelines, and “hillclimbing” experiments. - **Productionize AI Workflows**: Partner with the modeling team to turn raw LLM capabilities into **hardened, multi-tenant microservices** with **guardrails** and **observability**. - **Optimize Performance & Cost**: Drive infra strategy for **model routing**, **prompt caching**, and **token optimization**. --- ## Requirements - **Education**: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related technical field. - **Experience**: **7+ years** building distributed systems, high-throughput APIs, or backend infrastructure for AI/ML products. - **Technical Stack**: Strong proficiency in **Go or Java** (systems) and **Python** (AI orchestration). - **Systems Thinking**: Deep understanding of database internals, distributed state management, and cloud-native architecture (e.g., **Kubernetes**, **FoundationDB**). - **Domain Expertise**: Familiarity with the “plumbing” of AI (vector indices, agent platforms, scalable data pipelines). - **Customer-facing technical experience**: Ability to explain hard failures to external audiences and earn trust. - **Product instinct**: Determine whether a customer issue is bespoke or a platform gap worth fixing for everyone. - **Cross-layer debugging**: Trace requests across services and root-cause issues using logs/telemetry. - **Eval frameworks**: Define quality metrics and use evals to improve quality systematically. - **Comfort with ambiguity** on open-ended, externally-driven problems. ### Bonus experience with - Query optimization and **SQL engine internals** - Designing **multi-tenant** systems for sensitive enterprise data - Search infrastructure for large-scale applications - Direct experience with any of the subsystems above --- 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** (http://careers.snowflake.com)
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