Snowflake
Technology
SeniorSoftwareEngineer-Metadata
Neural analysis suggests this role is
optimal for Senior candidates.
“Senior Software Engineer - Metadata at Snowflake. Skills: Distributed systems, Metadata management, Cloud-native services. Design metadata storage systems. Design metadata retrieval systems”
Industry & Context.
Solve problems
What They're Looking For.
Must Have
7+ years backend software engineering, Proficiency in Java, C++, Go, Design and operate distributed systems, Solid understanding of database internals, Proven ability to lead technical design, Clear design documents, Present tradeoffs to stakeholders
Nice to Have
Experience with data catalog, Experience with data governance, Experience with schema registry systems, Familiarity with cloud infrastructure, Prior work on multi-tenant SaaS platforms, Contributions to open-source projects
What You'll Do.
Design metadata storage systems
Design metadata retrieval systems
Build high-throughput services
Build low-latency services
Build observability tooling
Build reliability tooling
Build operational tooling
Design scalable data models
Design backend services
Implement backend services
Shape data asset management
How You'll Work.
Team & Collaboration
Internal teams; External customers; Product teams; Design teams; Partner engineering teams
Communication Scope
Present tradeoffs
Full Job Description
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. ABOUT THE ROLE Every time a Snowflake query runs — and we're talking billions of queries a day — something has to know exactly where every byte of customer data lives, which version is current, and how to coordinate it all in milliseconds. That's the Metadata team. We're the layer that makes Snowflake's AI Data Cloud feel instant and interoperable at exabyte scale. No one sees us. Everyone depends on us. If you love hard distributed systems and database engine problems, care about correctness and performance, and want your work to power the world's most demanding data workloads, Agentic dataflows, and the AI applications being built on top of them. WHAT YOU'LL BUILD - Core metadata storage and retrieval systems that power Snowflake's catalog, lineage, and governance products - High-throughput, low-latency distributed services in a cloud-native environment - APIs and frameworks consumed by internal teams and external customers - Observability, reliability, and operational tooling for production metadata services - Scalable data models that evolve with Snowflake's rapidly growing feature surface WHAT WE LOOK FOR Required - 7+ years of experience in backend software engineering - Strong proficiency in Java, C++, Go, or similar systems-level languages - Experience designing and
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