Performance Software Engineer, Query Processing
San Mateo, CA

Job Description

About Snowflake

Snowflake is growing fast and we're scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth. We're passionate about our people, our customers, our values and our culture! We're also looking for people with a growth mindset and the pragmatic insight to solve for today while building for the future. And as a Snowflake employee, you will be accountable for supporting and enabling diversity and belonging.

Snowflake started with a clear vision: make modern data warehousing effective, affordable, and accessible to all data users. Because traditional on-premises and cloud solutions struggle with this, Snowflake developed an innovative product with a new built-for-the-cloud architecture that combines the power of data warehousing, the flexibility of big data platforms, and the elasticity of the cloud at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions.

In addition, Snowflake's culture was built on the following values that are even more important to us today:

Put Customers First. We only succeed when our customers succeed

Integrity Always. Be open, honest, and respectful

Think Big. Be ambitious and have big goals

Be Excellent. Quality and excellence count in everything we do

Get It Done. Results matter!

Own It

Make Each Other the Best

Embrace each others Differences

We're hiring an exceptional Performance Software Engineer to work on the core query optimizer and distributed query and data processing engine at the heart of the Snowflake product. Simply stated, performance wins database deals. The Snowflake architecture is already highly differentiated in the industry with the levels of scale, concurrency, and overall performance it can achieve. This role is a unique opportunity to ensure that the database industry's newest and most innovative data warehouse is the fastest and most efficient.

As a Performance Software Engineer at Snowflake you will:

* Analyze all aspects of the Snowflake Query Engine and drive initiatives to understand what bottlenecks may exist and to improve them.
* Guide the development of tools that will aid in the measurement and analysis of performance, identify and understand performance bottlenecks in the system, and then dive into the code to solve them.
* Analyze root cause for latency across the system, develop solutions, and implement independently and with the broader team.
* Identify and help solve issues from the choice of execution plan to efficient resource management, all the way down to highly specialized vectorized execution.
* Evaluate and determine priorities with a critical understanding of where performance matters and where performance is irrelevant.
* Work with the broader engineering team to identify opportunities to improve system performance.

Our ideal Performance Software Engineer will have:

* 5+ years hands-on software engineering experience, with a specific focus on system performance.
* Strong database fundamentals including SQL, performance, multi-threading, and schema design.
* Strong CS fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems.
* Experience developing systems in C or C++, Java a plus.
* Ability to work effectively across engineering teams in multiple locations.
* The need for speed.
* Track record of identifying and implementing creative solutions for complex problems.
* BS in Computer Science, Masters or PhD preferred.

Why join the Query Processing team at Snowflake? As a member of our team, you will:

* Leverage the data and insights gathered from user queries to identify opportunities to make the system better and faster
* Build an industry-leading data management system that customers love.
* Measurably impact an innovative product area central to Snowflake's success.
* Improve the performance of a super-robust and secure enterprise SaaS platform that services millions of complex queries daily.
* Learn at scale as you work on a highly-scalable and reliable data processing platform that runs on hundreds and thousands of machines and executes Billions of queries.
* Ensure that we are shipping the highest performance service possible at each weekly release.
* Be part of a world-class team of both industry veterans and rising stars.

Snowflake is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, color, gender identity or expression, marital status, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, race, religion, pregnancy, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances.