{"id":62589,"url":"https://alion.io/job/snowflake-staff-software-engineer-cortex-ai-search-infrastructure","title":"Staff Software Engineer, Cortex AI Search Infrastructure","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":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":["Menlo Park, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":236000,"max":339250,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":339250},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":9,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Context Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"Cortex","optional":false},{"name":"Hybrid Search","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"Prompt Caching","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Snowflake","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"FoundationDB","optional":true},{"name":"Go","optional":true},{"name":"Java","optional":true},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":true},{"name":"Prometheus","optional":true},{"name":"Python","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-18T19:29:18Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-17","last_verified_at":"2026-10-17T23:54:37Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":60,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":60},"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.\nThe Cortex team is building the future of AI for enterprise data. This role focuses on the Search infrastructure that powers our flagship products like CoWork, Cortex Code & Cortex Agents fast, reliable, scalable and secure at the enterprise level.\nYou will be building high-performance retrieval engines (leveraging vector search, hybrid search, and semantic indexing) that power Snowflake Cortex. This involves optimizing how billions of rows of data areindexed and retrieved in milliseconds.\nWhat you will do in this role:\nArchitect Agentic Runtimes: Build and scale the orchestration engines that execute complex agentic workflows, ensuring low-latency tool execution and robust state management.\n\nScale Context Engineering Infra: Design high-performance systems for RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), including vector database integration, scalable and efficient search indexing, query processing, and result ranking, semantic caching, and automated metadata extraction.\n\nBuild the \"Evals Engine\": Develop the automated infrastructure required to run massive-scale golden set simulations, error analysis pipelines, and \"hillclimbing\" experiments.\n\nProductionize AI Workflows: Collaborate with the modeling team to take raw LLM capabilities and turn them into hardened, multi-tenant microservices with strict guardrails and observability.\n\nOptimize Performance & Cost: Direct the infra strategy for model routing, prompt caching, and token optimization to ensure Snowflake’s AI features are the most efficient in the industry.\n\nRequirements:\nEducation: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field.\n\nExperience: 9 + years of experience building distributed systems, high-throughput APIs, or backend infrastructure for AI/ML products.\n\nTechnical Stack: Deep proficiency in Go or Java (for systems) and Python (for AI orchestration).\n\nSystems Thinking: Strong understanding of database internals, distributed state management, and cloud-native architecture (Kubernetes, FoundationDB, etc.).\n\nDomain Expertise: Familiarity with the \"plumbing\" of AI: vector indices, agent platforms, and building scalable data pipelines.\n\n(Bonus) Experience with:\nQuery optimization and SQL engine internals.\n\nDesigning multi-tenant systems that handle sensitive enterprise data at scale.\n\nDeveloping search infrastructure for large-scale applications.\n\nDirect experience with any of the subsystems outlined above.\n\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":3899,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":9,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"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":"2026-08-18T19:29:18Z"}],"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":23,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.533,"p_room":0.44,"age_days":59,"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":339250,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/snowflake-staff-software-engineer-cortex-ai-search-infrastructure","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/snowflake-staff-software-engineer-cortex-ai-search-infrastructure.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-18T02:07:05Z","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":3468,"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-staff-software-engineer-cortex-ai-search-infrastructure"},{"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-staff-software-engineer-cortex-ai-search-infrastructure"},{"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-staff-software-engineer-cortex-ai-search-infrastructure"},{"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-staff-software-engineer-cortex-ai-search-infrastructure\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fsnowflake-staff-software-engineer-cortex-ai-search-infrastructure"}]}