Overview

Principal Software Engineer - Metadata - Germany at Snowflake. Build the future of the AI Data Cloud. Snowflake Metadata team builds a scalable metadata system that enables querying across petabyte-scale data efficiently.

The team develops distributed and multi-layered caches, transaction frameworks, declarative entity management, time travel and other core Snowflake services. It is also responsible for providing the foundation of global features like cross-region replication, data sharing, and data marketplace.

Responsibilities

• Solve real business needs at large scale by applying software engineering and analytical problem-solving skills.
• Create architecture and design, influence the product roadmap, and take ownership and responsibility over new projects.
• Design, develop, and support a highly-parallel and fault-tolerant database system including a decentralized caching system of terabytes of metadata with an ever-growing request rate.
• Design and implement core foundational features including transactions, DDL/DML logs, metadata API, and advanced features built on top of the metadata, such as declarative entity management and integrations to support developer toolchains.
• Analyze and understand performance and scalability bottlenecks in the system and solve them.
• Ensure operational readiness of the services and meet commitments to customers regarding availability and performance.

Qualifications

• 14+ years industry experience designing, building and supporting large-scale production systems.
• Strong computer science fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems.
• Sharp original thinking to make the right choices and guide teams.
• Systems programming skills including multi-threading, concurrency, caching; fluency in Java or other similar procedural/object-oriented language is preferred.
• Track record of identifying and implementing creative solutions to complex problems.
• Knowledge of database internals is a big plus.
• Ability to work effectively across engineering teams in multiple locations.
• BS in Computer Science; Masters or PhD preferred.

Location: Berlin, Germany. Relocation support available for relevant candidates.

Other

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.