Snowflake SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER - POLARIS & DATA LAKE CATALOG 

United States, California 

729501683

• Design and implement scalable, distributed systems to enable support for Iceberg DML/DDL transactions, schema evolution, partitioning, time travel, and more.
• Architect and build systems that integrate Snowflake queries with external Iceberg catalogs (e.g., AWS Glue, Databricks Unity) and various data lake architectures, enabling seamless interoperability across cloud providers.
• Develop high-performance, low-latency solutions for catalog federation, allowing customers to manage and query their data lake assets across multiple catalogs from a single interface.
• Collaborate with Snowflake’s open-source team and the Apache Iceberg community to contribute new features and enhance the Iceberg REST specification.
• Work on core data access control and governance features for Polaris, including fine-grained permissions such as row-level security, column masking, and multi-cloud federated access control.
• Contribute to our managed Polaris service, ensuring that external query engines like Spark and Trino can read from and write to Iceberg tables through Polaris in a way that’s decoupled from Snowflake’s core data platform.
• Build tooling and services that automate data lake table maintenance, including compaction, clustering, and data retention for enhanced query performance and efficiency.

• 8+ years of experience designing and building scalable, distributed systems.
• Strong programming skills in Java, Scala, or C++ with an emphasis on performance and reliability.
• Deep understanding of distributed transaction processing, concurrency control, and high-performance query engines.
• Experience with open-source data lake formats (e.g., Apache Iceberg, Parquet, Delta) and the challenges associated with multi-engine interoperability.
• Experience building cloud-native services and working with public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• A passion for open-source software and community engagement, particularly in the data ecosystem.
• Familiarity with data governance, security, and access control models in distributed data systems.

• Contributing to open-source projects, especially in the data infrastructure space.
• Designing or implementing REST APIs, particularly in the context of distributed systems.
• Managing large-scale data lakes or data catalogs in production environments.
• Working on highly-performant and scalable query engines such as Spark, Flink, or Trino.

• Be part of a pioneering effort to build the most open and interoperable data lake ecosystem in the industry.
• Work on a high-impact open-source project that solves real-world data challenges for enterprise customers like Netflix, AWS, and others.
• Collaborate with some of the brightest minds in the data ecosystem, including core contributors to Apache Iceberg.
• Have the opportunity to innovate in one of the fastest-growing and evolving areas in data infrastructure, where you can make a direct impact on Snowflake’s growth and the broader open-source community.

The following represents the expected range of compensation for this role:

• The estimated base salary range for this role is $187,000 - $276,000.
• Additionally, this role is eligible to participate in Snowflake’s bonus and equity plan.