---
title: 'Senior / Staff Software Engineer — Product (Backend-Focused) at Snorkel AI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-software-engineer-product-backend-focused-snorkel-ai-san-francisco-ddrdvd6y804t'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-07'
---

# Senior / Staff Software Engineer — Product (Backend-Focused) at Snorkel AI

- **Company:** Snorkel AI
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $208k–$315k
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-10-27
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-07
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/snorkelai/jobs/6204036004

## Job description

## About Snorkel

Snorkel AI is the frontier AI data lab, helping teams build the data and environments behind high-performing frontier and agentic AI. We combine technology with research-driven AI data development to create datasets, benchmarks, evals, and custom solutions for real-world AI systems. Founded out of the Stanford AI Lab in 2019, Snorkel works with leading AI labs and enterprises to move from better data to better outcomes.

Excited to help us redefine how AI is built? Apply to be the newest Snorkeler!

## About the Role

We’re looking for Senior and Staff Product Engineers with strong backend engineering experience and a passion for building excellent products. You’ll help shape and deliver product capabilities that make complex workflows easier for users, from data cataloging and agent benchmarking to workflow automation.

Working closely with Product, Design, and Engineering, you’ll bring user problems into technical discussions and own backend features from concept through production. We value engineers who pair sound technical judgment with care for the quality, usability, and impact of the products they build.

## What You’ll Do

- Build, ship, and improve backend product capabilities, owning work from understanding the user problem through design, implementation, launch, and production support.
- Partner closely with Product Managers, designers, and engineers to shape features and turn user needs into intuitive, reliable product experiences.
- Build and evolve APIs, services, data models, and workflow capabilities that support the product.
- Help develop products for cataloging and searching data, benchmarking agent performance, and automating post-production and delivery workflows.
- Investigate and resolve issues across services and data flows, including performance and production problems.
- Contribute to technical and architecture decisions, with attention to scalability, maintainability, and the needs of the product.
- Participate in code reviews and help raise the quality of the team’s engineering work.
- Identify opportunities to improve the product and its underlying systems, and propose practical solutions.
- Work a hybrid schedule, with at least three days per week in our San Francisco, CA or New York City office.

## What We’re Looking For

We’re hiring Product Engineers at the Senior and Staff levels. We’re generally looking for candidates with 7+ years of software engineering experience, including:

- Strong backend or backend-oriented full-stack experience building and improving a product.
- A track record of contributing to polished, intuitive products that make complex tasks easier for users.
- Experience partnering with Product Managers and other cross-functional teammates to understand user needs and shape product features.
- Experience building and maintaining backend services and APIs, and working with data stores and queries.
- Strong engineering fundamentals and the ability to write reliable, maintainable code.
- The ability to investigate technical problems, debug effectively, and make sound decisions within your area of ownership.
- Clear communication skills and the ability to explain technical decisions to both engineering and cross-functional partners.
- The ability to work independently while collaborating closely with a team.

We value engineering fundamentals over experience with a particular language or framework. While we use Python it is not required; experience with Java, Go, Rust, C++, or another language is welcome so long as you can demonstrate strong engineering ability.

## Nice to Have

- Experience with data-heavy products, such as products for organizing, cataloging, searching, or querying complex datasets.
- Experience with agent workflows, agent evaluations, benchmarking, or analyzing traces of agent activity.
- Experience building workflow automation; familiarity with DAGs is helpful but not required.
- Experience in developer tools or other products with sophisticated user workflows.
- Experience taking a product feature from an initial user problem through launch and continued improvement.

## Why This Role

You'll have meaningful ownership over a product used by technical and enterprise teams solving real, high-stakes problems. This isn't a feature-factory role — you'll be working on interfaces and the systems behind them to make genuinely complex workflows feel simple, with a team that cares deeply about craft.

Snorkel AI is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer and is committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. Snorkel AI embraces diversity and provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment.

Actual compensation will be determined based on factors including skills, qualifications, experience, and geographic location. Actual compensation will be determined based on factors including skills, qualifications, experience, and geographic location.

Salary range(s) for this role $208,000—$315,000 USD

Be Your Best at Snorkel

Joining Snorkel AI means becoming part of a company that has market proven solutions, robust funding, and is scaling rapidly—offering a unique combination of stability and the excitement of high growth. As a member of our team, you’ll have meaningful opportunities to shape priorities and initiatives, influence key strategic decisions, and directly impact our ongoing success. Whether you’re looking to deepen your technical expertise, explore leadership opportunities, or learn new skills across multiple functions, you’re fully supported in building your career in an environment designed for growth, learning, and shared success.

Snorkel AI is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer and is committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. Snorkel AI embraces diversity and provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment. Snorkel AI prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type on the basis of race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, performance, merit, and business need.

We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.

## About Snorkel AI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: The frontier AI data lab helping teams build the data and environments behind high-performing frontier models and agentic AI.
- **Entity Type**: Private (multiple funding rounds; latest venture round in 2024; total funding $250.2M)
- **Headquarters**: Redwood City, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2019
- **Founders**: Not explicitly listed in provided sources; company originated from the Stanford AI Lab

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI data development, software development, AI/ML research
- **Target customers**: B2B; frontier AI labs, enterprises, government agencies
- **Mission**: “We’re building the data and environments behind the world’s most advanced AI systems.”

## Products & Services
- **Custom Data Development**: Bespoke datasets, evaluation frameworks, and benchmark expansions for specialized AI models and agents. Type: Service / Platform.
- **Specialized Agents**: Agents grounded in expert data, evaluated against task-specific rubrics and programmatic checks. Type: AI solution.
- **Snorkel Data Series**: Curriculum-structured datasets with rubrics, reviewer guidance, difficulty tiers, and eval slices. Type: Dataset product.
- **Evaluation Research**: Proprietary frameworks like RIFT (Rubric Failure Mode Taxonomy) and benchmarks such as OSWORLD 2.0 and Terminal-Bench 2.0. Type: Research / tooling.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company)
- **Key Metric**: Annual Revenue $38.6M (LinkedIn estimate) | Total Funding $250.2M (9 rounds)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Addition, Greylock, GV (Google Ventures), In-Q-Tel, Lightspeed Venture Partners, funds managed by BlackRock, QBE Ventures
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew 62.5% YoY to 801 employees; operates in 15 countries; trusted by leading AI labs and enterprises; 250+ publications at top conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, etc.)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Proprietary data development process** based on programmatic data labeling and weak supervision, pioneered at Stanford AI Lab
- **Deep academic roots** with ongoing research collaborations and peer-reviewed publications
- **Focus on frontier AI data quality** (task specification, calibrated review, provenance) rather than volume
- **Embedded delivery model** combining platform, research, and domain expertise

## Strategic Focus
- Building the data and environments for frontier models and agentic AI
- Expanding into enterprise and government deployments
- Advancing research on RLVR (Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards) in low-data regimes
- Creating evaluation standards for agentic systems (e.g., Terminal-Bench, OSWORLD 2.0)

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: “Quality first”, “Push the frontier”, “Competitive yet kind” – fast-moving, high bar, no ego
- **Locations**: Primarily San Francisco, Redwood City, and New York City, with remote/hybrid options globally
- **Benefits**: Comprehensive medical coverage, parental leave for birthing and non-birthing parents, flexible PTO, equity refresh grants, wellbeing allowance, company events
- **Engineering culture**: Work with PhDs, subject matter experts, and domain specialists on cutting-edge AI data challenges
- **Open roles**: 45 positions across Research, Engineering, Sales, Operations, Product, etc. (as of latest posting)

## Sources
1. [snorkel.ai/company/](https://snorkel.ai/company/)
2. [snorkel.ai/](https://snorkel.ai/)
3. [snorkel.ai/join-us/](https://snorkel.ai/join-us/)
4. [linkedin.com/company/snorkel-ai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/snorkel-ai)
5. [job-boards.greenhouse.io/snorkelai](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/snorkelai/jobs/5990959004)

## Other roles at Snorkel AI

- [Research Lead, Open Benchmarks Grants](https://feeny.ai/job/research-lead-open-benchmarks-grants-snorkel-ai-new-york-kw6b5aamy8ee) — New York, NY / San Francisco, CA / United States
- [Program Director - Open Benchmarks Grants](https://feeny.ai/job/program-director-open-benchmarks-grants-snorkel-ai-new-york-7r1wqh4k390n) — New York, NY / San Francisco, CA / United States
- [Operations Manager - Supply](https://feeny.ai/job/operations-manager-supply-snorkel-ai-new-york-vvbwh22qm63y) — New York, NY / San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Engineering Manager, Federal & Regulated Infrastructure](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-engineering-manager-federal-regulated-infrastructure-snorkel-ai-san-bqacd7mx1cq9) — San Francisco, CA / United States
- [Finance Manager - Data as a Service](https://feeny.ai/job/finance-manager-data-as-a-service-snorkel-ai-san-francisco-sk0nev7hb7y8) — San Francisco, CA
- [Corporate FP&A Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/corporate-fp-a-manager-snorkel-ai-san-francisco-hk5zmztnam66) — San Francisco, CA
- [Research Fellow](https://feeny.ai/job/research-fellow-snorkel-ai-new-york-5tcdjy7s6281) — New York, NY / San Francisco, CA / United States
- [Staff Applied AI Engineer - Enterprise AI Solutions](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-applied-ai-engineer-enterprise-ai-solutions-snorkel-ai-new-york-1t7se7awve1z) — New York, NY / San Francisco, CA / United States
- [Principal Brand Designer](https://feeny.ai/job/principal-brand-designer-snorkel-ai-new-york-rnsmmx7xven9) — New York, NY / San Francisco, CA
- [Director, Data Partnerships](https://feeny.ai/job/director-data-partnerships-snorkel-ai-san-francisco-t7nyqv66fahj) — San Francisco, CA