Software Engineer, AI Team

In addition to the base salary displayed, this role includes a 10% annual bonus and an RSU package valued at approximately 30-50% of the annual base salary.

We’re at the forefront of the data revolution, committed to building the world’s greatest data and applications platform. Our ‘get it done’ culture allows everyone at Snowflake to have an equal opportunity to innovate on new ideas, create work with a lasting impact, and excel in a culture of collaboration. We're looking for a talented and motivated Software Engineer to join the Cortex AI Functions Platform team. AI functions are how Snowflake customers call AI directly from SQL, running models over their own tables without moving data out of the platform. Our team builds the platform that makes this work at data warehouse scale, where a single statement can expand into a large volume of inference requests that must complete predictably, within expected cost, and without compromising the query when a dependency degrades or fails. Current projects include a new architecture for multi-modal inference, quality gates that let us ship new functions and models with confidence at batch scale, and support for input data beyond plain text. Alongside these, we work continuously on throughput, cost and reliability as customer usage grows, and on making failures in the inference path easier to detect, diagnose and recover from. For this role, you don’t need to have a research background, including pre-training or fine-tuning models.

Your journey as a Software Engineer

Working in our team you will

• Think creatively to find optimal solutions to our complex, often ambiguous problems
• Participate in all stages of building and running the platform behind Snowflake’s AI functions, from design and implementation through rollout and production support
• Work closely with research teams, as well as product and engineering partners, to understand and shape the short and long-term product development strategy
• Serve as a mentor to less experienced engineers

Ideal candidate

• 4+ years of experience building production backend or distributed systems in C++, Java, Go, Python, or a comparable language
• BSc in a technical field (CS, EE, Physics, Math, etc), MSc/PhD is a plus
• Experience designing and operating high-throughput services, including handling concurrency, backpressure, partial failures, and observability
• Experience designing service or RPC APIs, such as REST or gRPC
• Experience with software engineering best practices (programming, testing, version control, CI/CD, containers, agile development, etc)
• Experience with building distributed systems that guarantee high throughput without compromising on reliability
• High levels of curiosity and eager enthusiasm for open-ended problems, and the ability to turn a loosely defined problem into a scoped, testable design
• Ability to articulate results and complex concepts to leadership
• Must be able to produce solutions independently in an organized manner, as well as work in a team
• Experience with SQL engines, query execution, or other large-scale data systems is a strong asset
• Hands-on experience in the MLOps field (e.g., deploying ML models) is a plus