---
title: 'Principal Software Engineer - Performance Engineering (Cloud Infrastructure) at Snowflake'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/principal-software-engineer-performance-engineering-cloud-infrastructure-hr4dbyfrgvq9'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-18'
---

# Principal Software Engineer - Performance Engineering (Cloud Infrastructure) at Snowflake

- **Company:** [Snowflake](https://feeny.ai/companies/snowflake)
- **Location:** Menlo Park, CA
- **Compensation:** $264k–$380k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-09-17
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-18
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/snowflake/351f89c9-7502-4c5c-b600-b3a1192c45eb

## Job description

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 infrastructure, workload behavior, performance measurement, and business economics. We drive Snowflake’s cloud infrastructure 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., AWS 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 concrete rollout and adoption recommendations.
- Lead cross-functional and CSP partnerships. Work across engineering (i.e. Warehouse, Capacity, and other core platform teams) and Finance along with AWS, Azure, GCP to qualify new hardware and influence future cloud-instance designs.
- Characterize hardware performance at a deep level. Analyze CPU microarchitecture (e.g., memory bandwidth, PMU counters, I/O behavior) to identify workload-specific bottlenecks and drive resolution.
- Develop price/performance model to support new hardware transitions.
- Automate day-zero hardware readiness. Build automated performance-validation workflows and per-provider/per-instance scorecards so Snowflake can qualify and price new silicon at or near cloud-provider GA.
- Grow the performance engineering discipline. Mentor engineers, build out benchmarking capability, and drive company-wide performance education (e.g., a recurring Performance Tech Talk series).

Our ideal candidate will have:

- 12+ years of experience in performance engineering, systems engineering, or infrastructure engineering, with a track record of principal-level technical leadership.
- Deep expertise in cloud infrastructure performance across at least one major CSP (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including instance types, pricing models, and capacity constraints.
- Strong grounding in hardware/systems fundamentals: CPU microarchitecture, memory bandwidth, I/O subsystems, and use of profiling tools (PMU counters, etc.) to root-cause performance bottlenecks.
- Experience building or operating large-scale benchmarking systems (e.g., TPC-DS-style workloads) and turning benchmark output into actionable optimization strategies and pricing/rollout decisions.
- Ability to build quantitative models connecting technical performance metrics to business outcomes (pricing multipliers, cost-per-query).
- A track record of leading cross-functional, cross-company initiatives — comfortable being the primary technical point of contact with external hardware and cloud partners (CSPs, silicon vendors).
- Bias toward automation: builds scorecards, dashboards, and validation pipelines rather than relying on one-off analysis.

## Nice to Have

- Experience with data warehouse / distributed database performance characteristics.
- Direct experience partnering with cloud providers or silicon vendors on early-access hardware programs.
- Experience building hardware-emulation systems.

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? For jobs located in the United States, please visit the job posting on the Snowflake Careers Site for salary and benefits information: [careers.snowflake.com](http://careers.snowflake.com)

## About Snowflake

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Snowflake provides an AI Data Cloud platform that enables enterprises to store, analyze, and securely share their data across multiple clouds and geographies.
- **Entity Type**: Public (NYSE: SNOW)
- **Headquarters**: Bozeman, Montana, United States
- **Founded**: 2012
- **Founders**: Not explicitly listed in the provided search results (widely known co-founders include Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes, Marcin Zukowski – not verified in these search results)

## Core Business
- **Primary Industry**: Enterprise software, cloud data platform
- **Target Customers**: B2B, including large enterprises (e.g., hundreds of the world’s largest companies), mid-market, and SMBs
- **Mission**: “To Mobilize the World’s Data” (Glassdoor) and “empower every enterprise to achieve its full potential through data and AI” (Snowflake Careers page)

## Products & Services
- **Snowflake AI Data Cloud**: A unified, multi-cloud platform that combines data warehousing, data lakes, data sharing, and AI/ML capabilities. Customers can discover, share, and analyze data while running analytic workloads across public clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP).
- **Snowflake Marketplace**: A marketplace for discovering and accessing third‑party data sets and applications.
- **Snowflake‑Powered Applications**: Platform for building and deploying data‑intensive applications.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not directly provided in search results (as a public company, market cap fluctuates and is available on financial websites).
- **Key Metric**: Annual Revenue – $1 to $5 billion (USD) per Glassdoor.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not explicitly mentioned in the search results (historically backed by Sequoia Capital, Dragoneer, etc. – not verified here).
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Named #1 on the 2023 Fortune Future 50 List ([Fortune.com](https://fortune.com))
  - Listed as a U.S. Best Large Place to Work by BuiltIn in 2024
  - Recognized as one of the “20 Coolest Cloud Software Companies” by CRN in 2022 and 2024
  - Headcount of 5,001–10,000 employees with 30 global locations; actively hiring
  - Revenue range $1B–$5B indicates strong scale

## Competitive Advantages
- **Multi‑Cloud Flexibility**: Operates across AWS, Azure, and GCP, avoiding vendor lock‑in.
- **Unified Data Experience**: One platform for data sharing, analytics, and AI, reducing silos.
- **Separation of Compute and Storage**: Allows independent scaling and cost efficiency (not detailed in provided sources, but a known differentiator).
- **Strong Ecosystem**: Data marketplace and extensive partner network.

## Strategic Focus
- **AI & Data Innovation**: The company’s current emphasis is on making “enterprise AI easy, efficient, and trusted” and integrating AI capabilities into the Data Cloud.
- **Global Expansion**: Active hiring across 30 locations indicates continued geographic growth.
- **Customer‑Centric Development**: Focus on empowering enterprises to achieve “full potential through data and AI.”

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Described as “driven by innovation, low egos, high bars, and collaboration” (Snowflake Careers page). Glassdoor rating of 3.9/5 overall (78% approve CEO).
- **Work‑Life Balance**: Glassdoor rates Work/Life Balance at 3.7/5; many remote and hybrid roles available (see Indeed listings).
- **Benefits**: “Benefits & Beyond” program includes competitive compensation, equity, career advancement programs, and commitment to pay equality and veteran hiring.
- **Engineering Focus**: Hiring process includes 2–4 week timeline with technical interviews; the company values impactful, project‑based work for all roles, including interns.
- **Recognition**: Named a Best Large Place to Work (BuiltIn 2024) and future‑focused by Fortune, signaling strong employer brand.

## Sources
1. [Snowflake Careers Overview](https://careers.snowflake.com/us/en)
2. [Life at Snowflake](https://careers.snowflake.com/us/en/snowflake-life)
3. [Snowflake on Glassdoor](https://www.glassdoor.com/Overview/Working-at-Snowflake-EI_IE928471.11,20.htm)
4. [Snowflake Hiring Process](https://careers.snowflake.com/us/en/gethired)
5. [Snowflake on Indeed](https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Snowflake-7f4a7fba)
6. [Snowflake Careers Portal (Ashby)](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/snowflake) – provided by user

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