---
title: 'Senior Software Engineer, Cortex Quality at Snowflake'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-cortex-quality-snowflake-menlo-park-qy2qznv7m73x'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-04'
---

# Senior Software Engineer, Cortex Quality at Snowflake

- **Company:** [Snowflake](https://feeny.ai/companies/snowflake)
- **Location:** Menlo Park, CA
- **Compensation:** $200k–$270k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-08-31
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-04
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/snowflake/c0b3a0bb-f3bd-4df2-863e-5abe846ba1c0

## 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.

Cortex Code is Snowflake’s coding agent for building with data. It ships inside the platform that thousands of the world’s largest enterprises — including a large share of the Forbes Global 2000 — run their data on, which means the quality of this agent is felt by the data teams behind a meaningful slice of the global economy. We are taking coding agents from impressive demos to tools Data Science and Engineering teams depend on every day, and we hold them to a rigorous, public bar.

See our data engineering agent benchmark https://www.snowflake.com/en/blog/engineering/data-eng-bench-data-engineering-agent-benchmark/.

## ABOUT THE ROLE

This is a measurement-first role that owns the quality and efficiency of Cortex Code end to end: how good the agent is, how much it costs to run, and how reliably it behaves in production. You will take agents from research capability to real, measurable user value — turning fuzzy “the agent feels worse” signals into hard metrics, running the experiments that move them, and shipping the changes that stick. You will work on a small, high-powered modeling and infrastructure team where your work reaches every developer building on Snowflake.

## WHAT YOU WILL DO IN THIS ROLE

- Take agents from prototype to production: design and refine agent behaviors for real coding and data-engineering workflows, and make them reliable enough to depend on.
- Own agent quality end to end: build eval harnesses, diagnose failure modes from real agent trajectories, and run experiments that hillclimb the metrics that matter.
- Drive down cost and latency without regressing quality: prompt caching, context compaction, tool-result offloading, and cheaper model routing for sub-tasks. At Snowflake scale, efficiency is user value.
- Debug production failures and systematically increase robustness: close the loop from a customer’s broken run back to a fix and a regression test.
- Build the data pipelines that feed real-world task insights back into evals and modeling.
- Onboard and bake off frontier models: measure their strengths and failure modes, and decide where each belongs in the product.
- Partner with product and infra: shape user-facing agent behavior, and set the metrics and standards that define a successfully completed complex task.

## REQUIREMENTS

- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Statistics, or a related field. Master’s or higher preferred but not a requirement.
- 6+ years of experience shipping software in production, including AI/LLM features.
- Fluency in at least one of Python, TypeScript, or Go, and willingness to work across all three
- A measurement-first, systems-thinking instinct: you optimize for user outcomes over isolated metrics, and you can design an eval that is not fooling you (sampling, ground-truth quality, leakage, noise).
- Comfort debugging complex, unpredictable, real-world failures.
- Strong communication skills: you can make a quality or cost result legible to engineers, product, and leadership, and collaborate effectively in a team environment.

## NICE TO HAVE

- Deep hands-on experience with agentic coding tools and real intuition for model strengths, failure modes, and prompting limits.
- Prior work on eval harnesses, LLM observability, or safety/guardrails in production.
- Background in data engineering, data modeling, analytics, retrieval/RAG, or semantic layers, which is highly relevant for data-centric coding agents.
- Experience working with large-scale datasets or production system logs.

YOU MAY BE A PARTICULARLY GOOD FIT IF YOU

- Are a power user of modern coding agents and want to turn that intuition into systematic measurement and improvement.
- Have built and owned complex systems — pipelines, orchestration, or software with substantial state, branching logic, and operational requirements.
- Thrive in high-intensity environments with short feedback loops and high standards for rigor.
- Take problems to completion independently: you don’t stop at a prototype; you care about production reliability and clear metrics.
- Are genuinely bothered by numbers that do not reconcile.

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

## Other roles at Snowflake

- [Strategic Events Specialist, EMEA](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-events-specialist-emea-snowflake-london-e0aktq37y0hh) — London, United Kingdom
- [Sales Development Representative](https://feeny.ai/job/sales-development-representative-snowflake-sydney-x4rdpkcc3yzd) — Sydney, Australia
- [AI Research Scientist, New Grad – Agents & Reinforcement Learning](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-research-scientist-new-grad-agents-reinforcement-learning-snowflake-bellevue-a87enzz636zr) — Bellevue, WA
- [Principal Business Operations Manager, Ops & AI Tooling](https://feeny.ai/job/principal-business-operations-manager-ops-ai-tooling-snowflake-menlo-park-cv7r8zmydckx) — Menlo Park, CA
- [Senior Software Engineer - Cloud Efficiency](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-cloud-efficiency-snowflake-bellevue-nd411k1s2v4a) — Bellevue, WA
- [Head of Marketing, GCC](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-marketing-gcc-snowflake-bangalore-8j4b1v6w8eyq) — Bangalore, India
- [Enterprise Account Executive - Expansion](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-account-executive-expansion-snowflake-stockholm-dqa3xyhzth4f) — Stockholm, Sweden
- [Senior Cloud Support Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-cloud-support-engineer-snowflake-tokyo-mjkx9212eavf) — Tokyo, Japan
- [Solutions Architect, Frontier Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/solutions-architect-frontier-engineering-snowflake-tokyo-6zrwry1jdaw4) — Tokyo, Japan
- [Senior Software Engineer - Cloud Security](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-cloud-security-snowflake-menlo-park-sj8s5qyrkvgq) — Menlo Park, CA