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.

Staff Software Engineer - External Observability Platform

Location: Bellevue, WA (Hybrid: 3 days/week in-office)

Team: Infrastructure & Observability Platform Engineering

About the Role

Snowflake’s Data Cloud processes exabytes of data across multi-cloud global environments every day. Delivering seamless reliability and real-time visibility to thousands of global enterprise customers requires an Observability Platform built on hyper-scalable backend distributed systems.

We are seeking a Staff / Lead Software Engineer to architect, design, and scale our External Observability Platform. In this role, you will lead the technical strategy for customer-facing telemetry, system metrics, audit logs, distributed tracing, and actionable operational insights. You will build high-throughput, low-latency infrastructure capable of ingesting, processing, and serving petabytes of telemetry data with strict SLA guarantees.

You will join a team of world-class engineers in our Bellevue, WA office. To be successful, you must be deeply technical, capable of leading complex cross-functional architecture initiatives, and skilled at mentoring senior engineers while holding your own with the brightest technical minds in the industry.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect & Scale Distributed Infrastructure: Lead the technical vision, design, and execution of Snowflake’s External Observability platform capable of handling trillions of events per day across multi-cloud deployments (AWS, Azure, GCP).

• Define Observability Standards: Standardize telemetry generation (metrics, logs, traces, and events) across all Snowflake application engineering teams, ensuring consistent schema, zero-data-loss ingestion, and optimized storage access.

• Build High-Throughput Engines: Write scalable, reliable, and testable backend services to process time-series data, high-cardinality metrics, and distributed traces at massive scale.

• Automate Infrastructure Lifecycle: Practice infrastructure-as-code (IaC) using tools like Terraform to deliver self-healing, automated telemetry pipelines and dynamic monitoring topology.

• Drive Platform Adoption & Diplomacy: Collaborate closely with Application Engineering, Security, and Customer Support teams to make systems measurable, translate telemetry into actionable customer-facing insights, and resolve cross-organizational technical dependencies.

• Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Drive engineering excellence through rigorous design reviews, technical roadmapping, performance tuning, and mentoring engineers across the broader organization.

• Incident Escalation & Root Cause Analysis: Serve as an expert troubleshooter for critical, complex system failure modes across large distributed clusters, conducting deep-dive post-mortems and building automation to eliminate repeat incidents.

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional experience building infrastructure and backend distributed systems at scale using languages such as Go, C++, Java, or Rust.

• Proven track record of architecting, deploying, and maintaining hyper-scale distributed platforms in public cloud environments (AWS, Azure, or GCP).

• Deep theoretical and practical CS fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, concurrency patterns, storage engines, distributed consensus, networking protocols).

• Strong experience with infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools such as Terraform, or Pulumi.

• Hands-on expertise with time-series databases, high-cardinality metric stores, distributed tracing frameworks (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger), or log streaming systems (Kafka, Flink, ClickHouse, Prometheus/Thanos).

• Superior communication, collaboration, and diplomatic skills—ability to align cross-functional teams around architectura