Staff Software Engineer, App Runtime

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.

About the role

The App Runtime team is building a platform that lets every Snowflake user go from an idea to a live, deployed web application (Node.js first) in minutes. We own the end-to-end experience of building and running apps, from Cortex AI-assisted development to deployment in a secure, scalable infrastructure. Apps built on the platform inherit Snowflake's security, governance, lineage, and access controls by default. See Deploy Faster with Snowflake Apps https://www.snowflake.com/en/blog/snowflake-apps-build-deploy-faster/.

As a Staff/Principal Engineer, you will shape the product and its architecture. It’s a high leverage role - you will lead a team to scale and harden an early-stage, public-preview product. Your decisions will have a long-lasting impact on the future of Snowflake as an app platform. This role requires a unique combination of deep hands-on expertise in scalability, performance and security, great product instincts, customer obsession and the organizational influence to drive cross-team programs.

Responsibilities

- Own the roadmap and technical decisions to evolve the public-preview platform into a production-grade one, adding features like horizontal scaling, cost efficiency via suspend/resume, support for stacks beyond Node.js, and stronger access and data-governance controls

- Stay deeply hands-on by authoring specs and implementing critical code across components from runtime infrastructure and the governance model to coding agents and user interfaces; lead by example

- Serve as the primary technical representative for App Runtime internally and externally

- Partner directly with customers, i.e. developers building Snowflake Apps, converting their needs to roadmap priorities

- Grow the team by setting a high engineering bar and incubating the next generation of technical leaders

- Align with adjacent teams like Container Platform, Networking, Cortex AI, Security and Snowsight on shared goals

Requirements:

- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field. Master’s or higher is preferred but not a requirement

- 10+ years of experience, with a demonstrated track record of architecting, shipping and operating high-scale, container-based (e.g. Kubernetes) platforms, including staff-level ownership of technical direction, cross-team delivery, and mentoring

- Proficiency in programming languages, such as Java, Python, TypeScript or Go (strong in backend and familiar with modern web stacks like Node.js), applied in distributed environments where security, reliability and performance are critical

- Exceptional communication skills: crisp write-ups, constructive debate, and ability to influence without authority across engineering and product

Nice to have:

- You led delivery of 0-1 products where you skillfully balanced the trade-offs between feature completeness and time-to-market

- You have hands-on experience designing and evolving developer-facing SDKs and APIs

- You designed multi-tenant systems (ideally app hosting platforms or tooling for developers) with strong isolation and a security-first posture

- You keep yourself and engineers around you accountable for measurable outcomes

- Your designs consider software holistically, from the…