Staff Software Engineer, Cortex AI Functions

Our vision is to make raw multimodal data agent-ready and useful for analytics at enterprise scale. With Snowflake AI Functions, we enable pipelines that transform PDFs, images, audio, and video into high-quality information for downstream agents and applications, with the scalability and performance of a data platform.

We bring semantic operators into SQL—extraction, classification, filtering, joins, summarization, and aggregation—so customers can process and analyze structured and unstructured data together in a single hybrid query or pipeline through Snowflake’s SQL query surface. Our work connects AI quality with database systems through AI-aware query planning, adaptive model selection, and semantic query optimization. We seek deep expertise in either AI quality and applied modeling or database systems.

As a Staff Software Engineer you will

• Serve as tech lead for a group of 2–4 engineers, independently driving a large project end to end—from problem definition and architecture through implementation, launch, and production outcomes.
• For AI quality initiatives, define model strategies tailored to product needs, balancing accuracy, cost, and latency. Drive evaluation, error analysis, prompt optimization, and model adaptation, including fine-tuning and post-training where appropriate. Guide model-specific hosting and inference optimizations with infrastructure partners, validating their impact on quality and performance.
• For database systems initiatives, advance AI-aware query planning, compiler optimizations, distributed execution, scheduling, and safe result reuse within SQL and data pipelines.
• Connect quality objectives with execution decisions; diagnose bottlenecks and improve correctness, reliability, observability, and efficiency across the data processing workflow.
• Co-define the product surface and business strategy with PMs and leadership, translating customer needs into product capabilities, priorities, and success metrics. Align partner teams and manage dependencies through delivery.
• Break complex projects into milestones, delegate work, unblock and mentor engineers, and maintain technical quality through hands-on contributions and design and code reviews.

…