Software Engineer Manager, Data Processing

The Team

We are hiring an Engineering Manager to lead our Data Processing team in Zurich. You will start with a pizza sized team with the goal to grow further.

The team owns the core engine that makes Observe work. That includes the systems that compiles our query language OPAL into SQL, the query execution pipeline that executes user queries, the scheduler which autoscales warehouses and packs workloads for high utilization and low query latencies, and our incremental view maintenance. Building features in these systems while keeping the system healthy, cost-efficient, and resilient at petabyte scale is a constant challenge. The team sits at the heart of Observe's differentiation: a full observability platform built entirely on Snowflake.

In this role you will

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of backend engineers working on compiler internals, distributed scheduling, query execution, and data materialization. Coach them on their careers and help each of them reach their full potential.

• Hire top talent, and represent Observe and Snowflake to candidates.

• Work closely with other Observe product and backend teams to plan and execute new product features and scale existing systems to meet new challenges.

• Work with core Snowflake engineering teams in Germany and the US to integrate Observe more deeply with Snowflake technologies. Communicate Observe's needs clearly and drive improvements in the underlying platform together.

• Strategically reduce technical debt in the area. Know where it lives, build a plan to pay it down, and balance that plan against new feature work.

• Keep many ongoing projects moving in parallel, setting clear priorities and making sure nothing important falls through the cracks.

• Own the operational health of the area: performance, compute cost efficiency, on-call load, and support cost. Lead the team through production incidents and customer escalations, and drive postmortems and follow-up work.

• Stay close to the code: write, review, and fix code when needed, and dig into real production workloads alongside the team.

Qualifications

• Proven record managing a team of 5+ engineers that delivered complex backend or infrastructure systems in a fast-paced environment.

• A background in database systems, such as query processing, query optimization, storage, or compilers.

• Solid experience building and operating distributed systems.

• Hands-on engineering skills: able to write, review, and fix production code.

• Able to run many concurrent projects at once and to prioritize clearly between them.

• Able to balance short-term operational needs with long-term architecture, and to make cost and performance tradeoffs based on data.

• Experience running a team that owns production services with on-call responsibilities.

• Excellent communicator, comfortable working across time zones and organizational boundaries.

• A bachelor's, master's, or doctorate degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field.

Bonus Points

• Experience with Snowflake or other large-scale data platforms or databases and knowledge of their internals.

• Familiarity with the observability space.

• Experience building an enterprise-grade SaaS product.

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