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# Principal Software Engineer II - Interoperable Foundations

- **Company:** Snowflake Inc.
- **Location:** Menlo Park, CA, United States
- **Experience:** Starter
- **Salary:** $304,000.0
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Artificial Intelligence, Data Analysis, Apache HTTP Server, Databases, Information Engineering, Data Manipulation Languages, Distributed Systems, Fault Tolerance, Interoperability, Metadata, Meta-Data Management, Metadata Repositories, Query Optimization, System Availability, Multi-Cloud, Agentic-AI, Powerquery
- **Published:** October 27, 2026
- **Apply:** https://diversityjobs.com/career/14437943/Principal-Engineer-Metadata-California-Menlo-Park

## About the Role

* 15+ Years Systems Experience: A proven track record of designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems and solving difficult multi-cloud interoperability challenges.
 * Database Internals Builder: Deep expertise in "building" database, metadata management, query optimization, data catalog, compaction, or large-scale state management systems.
 * 0->1 Technical Leadership: A history of implementing greenfield, cloud-scale solutions and migrating massive, high-throughput distributed systems to next-generation architectures.
 * Core Systems Fundamentals: Strong grasp of storage performance, distributed consistency trade-offs, and algorithms.

## Description

* 0->1 Metadata Redesign: Lead the ground-up re-architecture of our core metadata systems. You will build the highly concurrent transaction frameworks that power query, DML, and AI-driven data interactions, ensuring our metadata layer scales to support the massive contextual demands of agentic AI.
 * Championing the Open Standard (Apache Iceberg): Drive industry-defining innovations on Apache Iceberg. You will ensure open table formats are no longer just storage abstractions, but first-class citizens that deliver native-level performance and governance for analytics, data engineering, and AI workloads without vendor lock-in.
 * Building the Agentic Foundation: AI needs context to act safely and accurately. You will build the rich metadata structures that provide AI agents with the semantic understanding and governance required to navigate and manipulate massive global datasets.
 * Scale & Systems Resilience: Solve non-negotiable challenges in fault tolerance, high availability, and extreme performance for a global ecosystem that treats multi-cloud resiliency as a baseline requirement.
 * Strategic Influence: Own the end-to-end platform architecture, set and shape the future roadmap for how metadata interfaces with AI, and mentor the next generation of engineers in a low-ego, high-impact environment.