Principal Software Engineer - Observability
Snowflake · US-CA-Menlo Park
About this role
## Principal Software Engineer — Observability At Snowflake, we’re powering the era of the **agentic enterprise**. The Observability team builds the telemetry, analytics, and diagnostic platform that helps customers and engineers **understand workload health, detect problems early, and resolve them quickly**. We’re looking for a **hands-on, product-minded Principal Software Engineer** to help build an **AI-driven observability platform**, combining distributed-systems depth with a strong instinct for what customers and developers need. --- ## What you’ll do - **Architect and build distributed infrastructure**: Design scalable pipelines and services for ingesting, storing, and querying **logs, metrics, traces, and events** at very high volume—ensuring predictable cost, low query latency, fault isolation, and clear data-freshness guarantees. - **Ship observability products to customers**: Partner with product management and design to deliver customer-facing capabilities (telemetry collection, alerting, dashboards, diagnostics). Turn feedback and usage data into product decisions and own outcomes through launch and adoption. - **Build AI-driven detection and diagnosis**: Develop agentic workflows that correlate signals across the stack, surface anomalies, explain likely root causes, and recommend or take remediation steps—backed by high-quality telemetry and rigorous evaluation. - **Build and work AI-first**: Make AI integral to design, implementation, testing, and operations. Establish evaluation, security, and reliability standards for AI-powered capabilities and drive AI-first practices across the team. - **Lead from architecture through adoption**: Translate ambiguous needs into practical designs and milestones. Deliver intuitive **APIs, SDKs, and self-service experiences** using open standards such as **OpenTelemetry**, and guide incremental migrations from existing tooling. - **Raise the engineering bar**: Write and review production code, diagnose complex failures, own operational outcomes, and mentor engineers. --- ## What you bring - **12+ years** of software engineering experience, including technical leadership across complex backend, infrastructure, or data-platform initiatives spanning multiple teams. - Deep experience designing, building, and operating **large-scale distributed systems** (concurrency, consistency, caching, failure recovery, storage/query efficiency, performance). - Strong CS fundamentals and hands-on proficiency in **Java, Go, C++, or a comparable backend language**, plus experience with **AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud**. - **AI-first engineering practice**: actively use AI throughout the software lifecycle and demonstrate how it improves execution, problem-solving, and quality. - Track record of **shipping products to external customers**: partnering with product/design, turning ambiguous problems into delivered systems, and driving adoption and reliability after launch. - Clear written communication, low-ego collaboration, strong ownership, and experience mentoring senior engineers. - Degree in Computer Science (or related) or equivalent practical experience. **Especially relevant experience**: observability/monitoring/analytics platforms (logs, metrics, traces, alerting), **OpenTelemetry**, time-series or columnar storage, **AIOps/agentic diagnosis**, or developer-facing data products. --- ## Location note (US) For jobs located in the United States, please visit the job posting on the Snowflake Care
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