Staff Software Engineer (Cortex AI Infrastructure)

Join the Cortex Apps team at Snowflake, where you'll be at the forefront of building the future of AI for enterprise data. As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll focus on the backend infrastructure that powers our flagship products, ensuring they are fast, reliable, scalable, and secure. You'll have the opportunity to architect agentic runtimes, scale context engineering infrastructure, build the "Evals Engine," productionize AI workflows, and optimize performance and cost. This role offers comprehensive benefits, including health insurance, retirement plans, and generous time off.

• Architect and scale the orchestration engines that execute complex agentic workflows, ensuring low-latency tool execution and robust state management.
• Design high-performance systems for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), including vector database integration, scalable and efficient search indexing, query processing, and result ranking.
• Collaborate with the modeling team to take raw LLM capabilities and turn them into hardened, multi-tenant microservices with strict guardrails and observability.
• Experience: 5+ years of experience building distributed systems, high-throughput APIs, or backend infrastructure for AI/ML products
• Domain Expertise: Familiarity with the "plumbing" of AI: vector indices, agent platforms, and building scalable data pipelines
• Technical Stack: Deep proficiency in Go or Java (for systems) and Python (for AI orchestration)
• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field
• Systems Thinking: Strong understanding of database internals, distributed state management, and cloud-native architecture (Kubernetes, FoundationDB, etc.)
• Query optimization and SQL engine internals
• Designing multi-tenant systems that handle sensitive enterprise data at scale
• Direct experience with any of the subsystems outlined above
• Developing search infrastructure for large-scale applications