Principal Software Engineer - Performance Engineering (Cloud Infrastructure)
Snowflake
- Pay
- $264k–$380k
- Workplace
- On-site
- Location
- US-CA-Menlo Park · Menlo Park · California · United States
- First seen
- 6 days ago
- Last seen
- 4 hours ago
- Board
- Ashby
Summary
At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise.
- aws
- gcp
- azure
Posting
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