Principal Software Engineer - Performance (Hybrid) at Snowflake

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Job 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.

Principal Software Engineer — Performance Engineering (Cloud Infrastructure)

Engineering Location: Menlo Park

About the Team

The Capacity, Performance & Efficiency team sits at the intersection of cloud hardware, workload behavior, performance measurement, and business economics. We drive Snowflake’s cloud hardware adoption and evolution strategy, price/performance decisions, platform footprint expansion amidst capacity constraints, and strategic alignment with cloud service provider (CSP) technical roadmaps.

We're looking for a Principal Performance Engineer to drive Snowflake's cloud infrastructure performance strategy. This is a high-autonomy, high-impact role for someone who can go deep on hardware internals (CPU microarchitecture, memory bandwidth, I/O behavior) while also translating that technical depth into pricing, capacity, and roadmap decisions across Snowflake.

You will drive the evaluation of new hardware generations across all major cloud providers, build the benchmarking and modeling infrastructure that turns raw performance data into pricing and rollout decisions, and represent Snowflake in technical discussions with CSPs and silicon partners. You'll help grow performance engineering as a discipline across the company — mentoring engineers, building benchmark capability, and championing a culture of rigorous, data-driven performance work.

What You'll Do

Own new hardware evaluation and enablement. Lead evaluation of new AWS, Azure, and GCP instance types (e.g., Graviton, AMD Turin, Azure ARM/Cobalt, GCP Axion) by building representative benchmark and evaluation solutions.
Set performance strategy and architecture. Shape the team's technical roadmap, set direction on measurement methodology, and translate benchmark results into concrete rollout and adoption recommendations.
Lead cross-functional and CSP partnerships. Work across engineering (i.e. Warehouse, Capacity, and other core platform teams) and Finance along with AWS, Azure, GCP to qualify new hardware and influence future cloud-instance designs.
Characterize hardware performance at a deep level. Analyze CPU microarchitecture (e.g., memory bandwidth, PMU counters, I/O behavior) to identify workload-specific bottlenecks and drive resolution.
Develop price/performance model to support new hardware transitions.
Automate day-zero hardware readiness. Build automated performance-validation workflows and per-provider/per-instance scorecards so Snowflake can qualify and price new silicon at or near cloud-provider GA.
Grow the performance engineering discipline. Mentor engineers, build out benchmarking capability, and drive company-wide performance education (e.g., a recurring Performance Tech Talk series).

Our ideal candidate will have:

12+ years of experience in performance engineering, systems engineering, or infrastructure engineering, with a track record of principal-level technical leadership.
Deep expertise in cloud infrastructure performance across at least one major CSP (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including instance types, pricing models, and capacity constraints.
Strong grounding in hardware/systems fundamentals: CPU microarchitecture, memory bandwidth, I/O subsystems, and use of profiling tools (PMU counters, etc.) to root-cause performance bottlenecks.
Experience building or operating large-scale benchmarking systems (e.g., TPC-DS-style workloads) and turning benchmark output into actionable pricing/rollout decisions.
Ability to build quantitative models connecting technical performance metrics to business outcomes (pricing multipliers, cost-per-query).
A track record of leading cross-functional, cross-company initiatives — comfortable being the primary technical point of contact with external hardware and cloud partners (CSPs, silicon vendors).
Bias toward automation: builds scorecards, dashboards, and validation pipelines rather than relying on one-off analysis.

Nice to Have

Experience with data warehouse / distributed database performance characteristics.
Direct experience partnering with cloud providers or silicon vendors on early-access hardware programs.
Experience building hardware-emulation systems.

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

Benefits & Perks

Health & Wellness

Health Insurance

Comprehensive medical coverage is offered, with three plan choices in the US: a Cigna high-deductible plan paired with an HSA, a Cigna PPO, and a Kaiser HMO for California employees. Coverage begins on the date of hire for employees working at least 20 hours per week who enroll within 31 days.

Dental Insurance

Dental coverage in the US runs through a Delta Dental PPO, with preventive care at no charge, a $2,000 annual plan maximum, and orthodontia covered at 50% up to a $2,000 lifetime maximum.

Vision Insurance

US vision coverage through VSP carries a $10 exam copay, a $25 materials copay, and a frame allowance of up to $200 in network each year, with annual frequency for exams, lenses, and frames.

Health Savings Account (HSA)

US employees who enroll in the Cigna high-deductible plan receive an employer HSA contribution of $1,000 for single coverage or $2,000 when covering dependents, deposited in equal installments each pay period.

Flexible Spending Account (FSA)

US employees can elect healthcare, limited-purpose, and dependent care flexible spending accounts, with contributions up to the annual IRS maximum.

Life Insurance

Snowflake pays in full for basic life and basic AD&D cover in the US, each worth 2x salary up to $1,000,000. Voluntary buy-up cover is available in $10,000 increments up to the lesser of 5x earnings or $500,000.

Disability Insurance

Short-term disability in the US replaces 70% of income up to $3,500 per week for up to 180 days, and long-term disability replaces 60% of salary up to $25,000 per month starting on day 181. No election is required for either.

Mental Health Benefits

On-demand mental health and wellness programs are offered to employees and their families. In the US, Lyra Health provides 25 therapy or coaching sessions per year at no cost, available separately to the employee, a spouse or domestic partner, and dependents aged 13 and over, with 24/7 crisis support.

Pet Insurance

Pet insurance through Nationwide is available at preferred pricing to US employees.

Fitness Stipend

US employees who are not based at the Menlo Park or Bellevue offices receive a $50 per month reimbursement toward a gym membership or other fitness facility or program.

Wellness Programs

Weekly lunch and learns, virtual workout classes, and global wellness programs are open to employees wherever they work, including from home.

Financial

401(k) / Retirement Plan

Eligible U.S. employees can participate in Snowflake's Fidelity 401(k) from their first day, with traditional pre-tax, Roth, and after-tax contribution options and 5% pre-tax automatic enrollment after 31 days if they take no action.

Equity / RSUs

Eligible new hires receive an equity grant, with restricted stock units vesting over four years at 25% per year and then quarterly.

Employee Stock Purchase Plan

The Employee Stock Purchase Plan lets eligible employees buy SNOW shares at a 15% discount, using a look-back to the lower of the first or last day of the offering period. Payroll contributions are elective from 1% to 15%, with enrollment windows in February and August.

Time Off

PTO / Vacation

Paid time off is flexible rather than accrued, so there is no set balance to track. Employees coordinate time away with their manager ahead of time and are expected to balance it against their responsibilities and team needs.

Paid Holidays

Snowflake observes 13 annual holidays in the US.

Sick Days

Full-time exempt employees in the US take sick time as they need it, while non-exempt employees accrue 2.77 hours each pay period. Absences of more than five consecutive sick days move to a medical leave of absence.

Remote & Equipment

Company Equipment

Snowflake provides a work-from-home setup, including ergonomic work equipment, to employees worldwide.

Family & Care

Parental Leave

Birthing parents in the US are eligible for up to 26 weeks of paid, job-protected parental leave and non-birthing parents for up to 12 weeks, both at 100% of base pay. The policy covers children brought into the home through birth, adoption, or foster placement, and bonding time can be taken all at once or intermittently before the child's first birthday.

Childcare Support

US employees receive a premium Care.com membership at no cost plus subsidized backup care, capped at 10 days per employee each year across child, adult, and pet care combined.

Caregiver Policy

Family care leave is one of the formal leave-of-absence types available to US employees who need time away to care for a family member.

Professional Growth

Learning & Development Budget

Snowflake invests in structured career development through customized development tracks, job training and conference attendance, and weekly lunch and learns open to all employees.

Culture & Perks

Free Snacks & Drinks

The Menlo Park office has a cafe with free breakfast and lunch, and the Bellevue office provides catered meals.

Employee Resource Groups

Employee resource groups bring together employees with shared backgrounds and interests.

Emergency Travel Assistance

Employees travelling outside their home country on business are covered for urgent and emergency medical care, alongside business travel accident insurance provided at no cost.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many Snowflake roles are actually remote?

Snowflake is a Structured Hybrid employer. Its careers site tags every posting with a worker type of either On-Site or Remote, and never Hybrid: of 394 live postings on 7 August 2026, 82% were On-Site and 17.5% Remote. Our own snapshot of 396 active Snowflake jobs the same day breaks down as 319 hybrid, 61 remote and 16 onsite. The two counts measure slightly different things, but both put genuinely remote roles at roughly one in six.

Where does Snowflake hire?

Snowflake posts roles city by city rather than region-wide, and it does not advertise work-from-anywhere hiring. The 396 active jobs we tracked on 7 August 2026 cite locations in 25 countries, led by the United States with 247 roles, the United Kingdom with 29, India with 20, Australia with 17 and Japan with 12. The largest single locations are Menlo Park, California with 127 roles and Bellevue, Washington with 38. Its careers site names 27 countries of presence, but that describes where teams already sit rather than where the company will hire you.

How does Snowflake structure pay?

US job postings publish an explicit base salary range on the listing, for example a range of $204,000 to $267,700 with eligibility for bonus and equity. The careers site says eligible employees receive new hire equity, the Employee Stock Purchase Plan and a quarterly bonus or commission program, and the FY2026 annual report describes a mix of fixed and variable cash compensation rewarded against defined business results. The stock purchase plan buys shares at a 15% discount, and the company's US benefits site explains that the discount applies to the lower of the share price on the first or last day of the offering period, with payroll contributions elected between 1% and 15%.

Does Snowflake match 401(k) contributions?

No. Snowflake's FY2026 annual report states that contributions to the plan are discretionary and that the company did not make any matching contributions to the 401(k) plan for each of the fiscal years ended January 31, 2026, 2025 and 2024. The US plan is otherwise well built out: pre-tax, Roth and after-tax contributions are all offered, employees are eligible from their first day of employment, and anyone who does not act within 31 days is automatically enrolled at a 5% pre-tax contribution rate.

How does time off work at Snowflake?

Snowflake does not use the word unlimited for its time off, and in the US it does not accrue it either. Its benefits site says PTO isn't accrued, so there's no set balance to track, and asks employees to coordinate with their manager ahead of time to plan time off through the year. US sick time is take it as you need it for full-time exempt employees, while non-exempt employees accrue 2.77 hours each pay period, and an absence of more than five consecutive sick days moves to a medical leave of absence. In the US, Snowflake observes 13 annual holidays, and holiday calendars differ by locale.

What parental leave does Snowflake offer?

In the US, birthing parents are eligible for up to 26 weeks of paid, job-protected leave, and non-birthing parents for up to 12 weeks. Both figures are ceilings rather than fixed entitlements, and both apply to children joining the family through birth, adoption or foster placement. The 26 weeks include pregnancy disability time for delivery and recovery; the baby-bonding portion, and the full 12 weeks for non-birthing parents, can be taken all at once or intermittently in two-week blocks before the child's first birthday, or within a year of adoption or foster placement. Pay is 100% of base pay through a combination of Snowflake short-term disability for the birthing parent, local paid family leave income, and top-up pay from Snowflake. Requests need at least 30 days notice where the leave is foreseeable.

Job Description

Compensation

Benefits & Perks

Health & Wellness

Financial

Time Off

Remote & Equipment

Family & Care

Professional Growth

Culture & Perks

Tech Stack

Frameworks

Databases

Infrastructure

Frequently Asked Questions

How many Snowflake roles are actually remote?

Where does Snowflake hire?

How does Snowflake structure pay?

Does Snowflake match 401(k) contributions?

How does time off work at Snowflake?

What parental leave does Snowflake offer?

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