Senior Performance Engineer, Applied Performance Group

About Snowflake

There is only one Data Cloud. Snowflake’s founders started from scratch and designed a data platform built for the cloud that is effective, affordable, and accessible to all data users. But it didn’t stop there. They engineered Snowflake to power the Data Cloud, where thousands of organizations unlock the value of their data with near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance. This is our vision: a world with endless insights to tackle the challenges and opportunities of today and reveal the possibilities of tomorrow.

About Applied Performance Group at Snowflake

The Applied Performance Group (APG) Engineering team provides a strategic function at Snowflake, with direct impact to our product direction and bottom line.  APG engineers are a key bridge between Engineering organizations and across sales, support, and services organizations.  They are called upon to help with our most challenging customer performance issues as well as own strategic and competitive performance benchmarking. 

APG Engineers are at the cutting edge of innovation at Snowflake, pioneering Snowflake deployments with the newest technology and working with Engineering and Product Management to continuously improve the product and ensure we continue building the best Cloud Data Platform in the industry.

A successful Applied Performance Engineer will have a broad range of skills and experience ranging from strong Cloud, scripting, SQL, Python,  data analytics, data engineering, and performance analysis.  He/she will have the insight to make the connection between a customer’s specific business problems and Snowflake’s solution, the customer-facing skills to communicate that connection and vision to a wide variety of technical and executive audiences, and the technical skills to be able to not only build and execute proof-of-concepts and benchmarks, but also to provide consultative assistance in areas of product direction.

The person we’re looking for shares our passion about reinventing the data platform and thrives in the dynamic environment.  That means having the flexibility and willingness to jump in and get done what needs to be done to make Snowflake and our customers successful.  It means keeping up to date on the ever-evolving technologies for data and analytics in order to be an authoritative resource for both Snowflake and customers.  And it means working collaboratively with a broad range of people both inside and outside the company.

Responsibilities

• Be an expert on the topics of Snowflake architecture, query processing, workload profiling, and Snowflake tools
• Be an expert in competitor solutions/products for analytics, data engineering, HTAP, and OLTP
• Define, automate, execute and publish internal and competitive benchmarks
• Partner closely with other engineering teams to deliver both results and guidance on performance gaps, challenges, advantages, and disadvantages
• Collaborate with Product Management and Engineering to continuously improve Snowflake’s products and eco-system roadmaps.

Our Ideal Applied Performance Engineer will have:

• Minimum 5 years of experience in technical role delivering Database, Data Warehouse, or Data Engineering implementations and/or benchmark initiatives
• Experience and ability to work directly with other engineering teams, product managers, and various levels of management
• Strong communication skills, able to effectively communicate ideas and technical concepts to both technical and executive audiences
• Broad understanding of cloud platforms and solutions, including experience and understanding of large-scale infrastructure-as-a-service platforms (e.g. Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack)
• Proven track record of experience with Snowflake competitors
• Deep understanding of complete data engineering and analytics stack and workflow, from data ingestion and load to transformation to data platform design to BI and analytics tools
• Deep technical expertise in databases, data warehouses, data processing, and applications
• Coding/programming experience in process automation 
• Strong SQL performance analysis experience, with the ability to use tools to identify and articulate performance issues

Strongly Desired:

• Extensive knowledge of and experience with large-scale database technology (e.g. Databricks, Spark, Netezza, Oracle Exadata, Teradata, Greenplum, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, Microsoft Synapse, etc.)
• Software development experience with C/C++, Java, Scala, Spark
• Scripting experience with Python, Ruby, Perl, Bash
• University degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics or related fields, or equivalent experience.

Snowflake is growing fast, and we’re scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth. We are looking for people who share our values, challenge ordinary thinking, and push the pace of innovation while building a future for themselves and Snowflake.

How do you want to make your impact?

Every Snowflake employee is expected to follow the company’s confidentiality and security standards for handling sensitive data. Snowflake employees must abide by the company’s data security plan as an essential part of their duties. It is every employee's duty to keep customer information secure and confidential.