Senior Software Engineer - Open Source Analytics

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.

Snowflake’s vision is to enable every organization to be data-driven. We’re at the forefront of innovation, helping customers realize the full potential of their data with our AI data cloud. We are now going far beyond the traditional data warehouse and helping customers unlock the power of the open data lakehouse architecture with significant investment in Open Source Analytics!  Snowflake engineers are leading the way with innovations directly in OSS projects like Apache Iceberg, Apache Polaris (incubating), Apache Parquet and more!

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Open Source Analytics team, you’ll play a key role in building and evolving our open and interoperable data lake ecosystem. You’ll work on some of the most complex and exciting challenges in the enterprise data lake analytics area, all while collaborating closely with some of the best minds in the open source community! You will have a direct impact towards Snowflake’s mission of providing a truly open data lake architecture, free from vendor lock-in.

AS A SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER ON THE OPEN SOURCE ANALYTICS TEAM, YOU WILL:

• Pioneer new and innovative technical capabilities in the Open Source Analytics community.   You will define and build next-generation capabilities on top of critical lakehouse building blocks like interoperable table formats, data catalogs, file formats, and query engines.

• Design and implement features and enhancements for Apache Iceberg and Apache Polaris focusing on scalability, performance and usability such as Iceberg DML/DDL transactions, schema evolution, partitioning, time travel, and more.

• Collaborate with the Open source community by contributing code, participating in discussions and reviewing pull requests to ensure high quality contributions.

• Architect and build systems that integrate open source technologies seamlessly with Snowflake - enabling our customers to build and deploy massive data lake architectures across platforms and across cloud providers.

• Collaborate with Snowflake’s open-source team and the Apache Iceberg community to contribute new features and enhance the Iceberg table format and REST specification.

• Work on core data access control and governance features for Apache Polaris

• Contribute to our managed Polaris service, Snowflake Open Catalog, enabling customers to seamlessly manage and expand their data lake through Snowflake as well as other external query engines like Spark and Trino.

• Build tooling and services that automate data lake table maintenance, including compaction, clustering, and data retention for enhanced query performance and efficiency.

OUR IDEAL SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER WILL HAVE:

• 5+ years of experience designing and building scalable, distributed systems.

• Strong programming skills in Java, Scala, or C++ with an emphasis on performance and reliability.

• Deep understanding of distributed transaction processing, concurrency control, and high-performance query engines.

• Experience with open-source data lake formats (e.g., Apache Iceberg, Parquet, Delta) and the challenges associated with multi-engine interoperability.

• Experience building cloud-native services and working with public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, or GCP.

• A passion for open-source software and community engagement, particularly in the data ecosystem.

• Familiarity with data governance, security, and access control models in distributed data systems.

BONUS POINTS FOR EXPERIENCE WITH:

• Contributing to open-source projects, especially in the data infrastructure space.

• Designing or implementing REST APIs, particularly in the context of distributed systems.

• Managing large-scale data lakes or data catalogs in production environments.

• Working on highly-performant and scalable query engines such as Spark, Flink, or Trino.

WHY JOIN THE OPEN SOURCE ANALYTICS TEAM AT SNOWFLAKE?

• Be part of a pioneering effort to build the most open and interoperable data lake ecosystem in the industry.

• Work on a high-impact open-source project that solves real-world data challenges for enterprise customers across all industry verticals.

• Collaborate with some of the brightest minds in the data ecosystem, including core contributors and PMC members of Apache Iceberg and Apache Polaris (incubating).

• Have the opportunity to innovate in one of the fastest-growing and evolving areas in enterprise data, where you can make a direct impact on Snowflake’s growth and the broader open-source community.
  

Every 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.

Snowflake 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.

How do you want to make your impact?

For jobs located in the United States, please visit the job posting on the Snowflake Careers Site for salary and benefits information: careers.snowflake.com