{"id":66331,"url":"https://alion.io/job/snowflake-principal-software-engineer-ii-next-gen-data-transformations","title":"Principal Software Engineer II - Next-Gen Data Transformations","company":{"id":96,"name":"Snowflake","domain":"snowflake.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/snowflake","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":86,"open_postings":50,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.56,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":54,"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":["Bellevue, United States","Menlo Park, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":304000,"max":437000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":437000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":14,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"ETL/ELT","optional":false},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Snowflake","optional":false},{"name":"Spark","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-04-01T01:55:29Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-04-01","last_verified_at":"2026-10-18T09:45:41Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":200,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":200},"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.\nWe are hiring a Principal Engineer II to architect the core data processing engine of the Snowflake Data & AI Cloud. At Snowflake, we believe that high-performance, unified compute fabrics are the indispensable building blocks for Agentic AI. Autonomous agents require more than just models; they require a high-fidelity, low-latency state layer to reason, act, and persist context. This role is not about building traditional data processing pipelines or legacy ETL/ELT workflows; it is about building the core distributed systems and atomic primitives that make those agentic workflows possible.\nIn this role, you will be a lead architect of the Snowflake Data Transformation Engine. You will design and implement the fundamental transformations infrastructure-Stateful Stream Processing Engines, Incremental View Maintenance Engine, Materialization Internals, and the Distributed Orchestration Fabric. Our solid foundation supporting the seamless transition for enterprises between batch and streaming through Dynamic Tables, Streams & Tasks, and DBT Projects is the starting point. Your architectural work will extend the reach of the core engine to accelerate and support the massive scale of the Snowpark and Spark ecosystems. You are building the systems that allow both data engineers and autonomous agents to process exabytes of data with sub-second state propagation and absolute transactional integrity across the Snowflake Data Cloud.\nAs a Principal Engineer II, you will own the technical vision for the Data Transformation umbrella of capabilities. Your work on streaming internals and declarative state management provides the architectural substrate for high-performance customer features processing. This foundational technology is engineered to drive low-latency, high-throughput data transformations at a massive scale to empower enterprises to build and scale complex applications, including autonomous agentic loops. This infrastructure enables our broader ecosystem to operate on live, governed data, ensuring that the core engine primitives we build translate directly into superior data freshness and processing efficiency for every customer.\nAS A PRINCIPAL SOFTWARE ENGINEER II AT SNOWFLAKE YOU WILL:\nArchitect Foundation Primitives for Agentic AI Data Engineering: Design the internal engines for Dynamic Tables, Streams, and Tasks, ensuring the underlying processing kernels provide the elastic, serverless foundation required for real-time agentic reasoning.\n\nBuild the Data Transformation Processing Fabric: Develop the low-level infrastructure for automated triggers and incremental processing logic, allowing the Snowflake engine to proactively manage, optimize, and process incoming data without manual intervention.\n\nInnovate in System Internals: Drive the long-term roadmap for stateful streaming, moving the industry toward a freshness-first system architecture where data is always ready for model consumption.\n\nDisplace Legacy Orchestration Layers: Identify how to build superior, native processing capabilities directly within the Snowflake engine to eliminate the complexity of external schedulers, simplifying the architectural scaffolding for our customers.\n\nEngineer for Global Scale and Governance: Design and implement highly reliable, multi-tenant system internals that handle exabytes of data while maintaining Snowflake’s industry-leading standards for resource isolation, security, and distributed consistency.\n\nDrive Technical Strategy for the AI Era: Provide technical leadership to senior management and multiple departments, influencing how Snowflake’s core compute fabric evolves to support the burgeoning Model Context Protocol (MCP), autonomous agent ecosystems and modern Python and Spark data processing workflows.\n\nDrive Customer Success through Direct Engagement: Partner with Snowflake’s most strategic customers and field engineering teams to translate massive-scale architectural challenges into core engine requirements, ensuring our processing primitives meet the real-world demands of the global Data Cloud.\n\nEnsure Operational Excellence: Take responsibility for the operational readiness of the services, meeting the strict commitments to our customers regarding reliability, availability, and performance.\n\nOUR IDEAL PRINCIPAL SOFTWARE ENGINEER II WILL HAVE:\n14+ years of industry experience building database systems internals, distributed systems internals, or large-scale data processing engines.\n\nStrong Technical Leadership: Operates as a broad architect, setting architectural direction, mentoring senior engineers, and establishing technical standards for large cross-product initiatives, coupled with exceptional ability to navigate organizational complexity, align multiple teams, and drive cross-functional decisions spanning multiple teams\n\nMastery of Systems Programming: Deep expertise in stateful stream processing, incremental view maintenance, distributed transactions, and query execution internals.\n\nInfrastructure-First Mindset: You are a systems builder. You prefer building the Operating System and the Engine rather than the application or the end-user pipeline.\n\nDistributed Systems Expertise: Proven track record of solving complex problems in consensus, replication, and high-concurrency environments at cloud scale.\n\nEcosystem Awareness: A deep understanding of the architectural limitations of traditional orchestration and data processing tools, and a vision for how to solve those challenges through native Snowflake system design.\n\nCollaborative Leadership: Ability to work in a globally distributed environment, collaborate across product and engineering boundaries, and mentor senior and junior engineers alike.\n\nWHY JOIN THE ENGINEERING TEAM AT SNOWFLAKE?\nYou will build the industry-leading Cloud Data and AI Platform. This is not just about maintaining a product; it is about innovating with rigor to solve the hardest problems in distributed systems.\nEvery Snowflake employee is expected to follow the company’s confidentiality and security standards for handling sensitive data. Snowflake employees must abide by the company’s data security plan as an essential part of their duties. It is every employee's duty to keep customer information secure and confidential.\nSnowflake is growing fast, and we’re scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth. We are looking for people who share our values, challenge ordinary thinking, and push the pace of innovation while building a future for themselves and Snowflake.\nHow do you want to make your impact?\nFor jobs located in the United States, please visit the job posting on the Snowflake Careers Site for salary and benefits information: careers.snowflake.com","description_format":"text","description_chars":7429,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":14,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Data Warehouses & Lakehouses","Databases & DBMS","Data Marketplaces, Sharing & Clean Rooms"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-04-01T01:55:29Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 529 · green card filings: 106","filings_12m":529,"filings_prev_12m":372,"green_card_filings_12m":106,"median_offered_wage_usd":160862,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":346}],"liveness":{"score":8,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.302,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":199,"expected_fill_days":54,"reasons":["conf:0","stale_co","velocity","win:tail","crowd:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":437000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/snowflake-principal-software-engineer-ii-next-gen-data-transformations","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/snowflake-principal-software-engineer-ii-next-gen-data-transformations.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-18T11:35:14Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":17183,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-19T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":96},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=96"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fsnowflake-principal-software-engineer-ii-next-gen-data-transformations"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fsnowflake-principal-software-engineer-ii-next-gen-data-transformations"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fsnowflake-principal-software-engineer-ii-next-gen-data-transformations"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/snowflake-principal-software-engineer-ii-next-gen-data-transformations\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fsnowflake-principal-software-engineer-ii-next-gen-data-transformations"}]}