Jobs Companies Snowflake Senior Software Engineer - Cortex AI - FDE

About this Senior Software Engineer - Cortex AI - FDE role at Snowflake

Snowflake · Hybrid · US-CA-Menlo Park

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.

The Cortex Apps team is building the future of AI for enterprise data. This role focuses on the backend infrastructure that powers our flagship products like Snowflake Intelligence, Cortex Agents and Search making agentic AI fast, reliable, scalable and secure at the enterprise level.

You won’t just be using AI tools; you will be building the high-performance systems that orchestrate them. You’ll own and influence the architecture for agent execution environments, high-throughput context retrieval, or the ecosystem that allows our customers to iterate and launch agents in production.

What you will do in this role:

  • Architect Agentic Runtimes: Build and scale the orchestration engines that execute complex agentic workflows, ensuring low-latency tool execution and robust state management.

  • Scale Context Engineering Infra: Design high-performance systems for RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), including vector database integration, scalable and efficient search indexing, query processing, and result ranking, semantic caching, and automated metadata extraction.

  • Build the "Evals Engine": Develop the automated infrastructure required to run massive-scale golden set simulations, error analysis pipelines, and "hillclimbing" experiments.

  • Productionize AI Workflows: Collaborate with the modeling team to take raw LLM capabilities and turn them into hardened, multi-tenant microservices with strict guardrails and observability.

  • Optimize Performance & Cost: Direct the infra strategy for model routing, prompt caching, and token optimization to ensure Snowflake’s AI features are the most efficient in the industry.

Requirements:

  • Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field.

  • Experience: 7+ years of experience building distributed systems, high-throughput APIs, or backend infrastructure for AI/ML products.

  • Technical Stack: Deep proficiency in Go or Java (for systems) and Python (for AI orchestration).

  • Systems Thinking: Strong understanding of database internals, distributed state management, and cloud-native architecture (Kubernetes, FoundationDB, etc.).

  • Domain Expertise: Familiarity with the "plumbing" of AI: vector indices, agent platforms, and building scalable data pipelines.

  • Experience in a customer-facing technical role — you have explained a hard failure to a frustrated external audience and been believed, you can produce both the internal analysis and the customer-safe version.

  • Product instinct — you can judge whether one customer's problem is bespoke or a platform gap worth fixing for everyone. This is the core judgment call.

  • Cross-layer debugging — tracing a request across services and root-causing in unfamiliar code from logs and telemetry, not guesswork.

  • Eval frameworks for LLM/agent systems — defining quality metrics and using evals to improve quality systematically over time.

  • Comfort with ambiguity on open-ended, externally-driven problems.

(Bonus) Experience with:

  • Query optimization and SQL engine internals.

  • Designing multi-tenant systems that handle sensitive enterprise data at scale.

  • Developing search infrastructure for large-scale applications.

  • Direct experience with any of the subsystems outlined above.

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

Ready to apply to Snowflake?
Apply to Snowflake

How this Software Engineer salary compares

This role pays $235,000/yrbelow the typical range for Software Engineer roles.

$195,000 median $243,750 $321,750

Typical range $243,750–$287,600/yr, from 41 comparable Software Engineer listings on JobsRadar (pay annualized to USD). See Software Engineer salary insights →

Similar jobs

Snowflake
Principal Software Engineer - Performance Engineering (Cloud Infrastructure)
Snowflake
⚡ Apply early US-CA-Menlo Park Onsite $264,000–$379,500
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 2d ago
Snowflake
Staff/Principal AI Software Engineer - Snowflake CoWork
Snowflake
⚡ Apply early US-CA-Menlo Park Onsite $264,000–$379,500
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 3d ago
Snowflake
Senior Software Engineer - Cloud Security
Snowflake
⚡ Apply early US-CA-Menlo Park Hybrid $200,000–$287,500
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 4d ago
Maincode
Software Engineer
Maincode
⚡ Apply early Seattle Onsite $130,000–$175,000
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 1h ago
Generalist
Software Engineer: Robotics Controls
Generalist
⚡ Apply early San Francisco Bay Area (San Ma... Onsite $200,000–$350,000
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 1h ago
Redwood Materials
Senior Software Engineer
Redwood Materials
⚡ Apply early McCarran, NV; San Francisco, C... Onsite $180,000–$237,500
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 2h ago
Sierra
Software Engineer, Agent (New Grad 2027)
Sierra
⚡ Apply early Singapore Onsite SGD 200,000–SGD 240,000
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 2h ago
Redwood Materials
Infrastructure Software Engineer, Energy Storage
Redwood Materials
⚡ Apply early San Francisco, California, Uni... Onsite $180,000–$237,500
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 3h ago
Redwood Materials
Software Validation Engineer, Energy Storage
Redwood Materials
⚡ Apply early San Francisco, California, Uni... Onsite $152,500–$342,500
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 3h ago

Sign up for suggestions tailored to the jobs you open and the searches you save.

More jobs at Snowflake

See all jobs at Snowflake →

Apply now
🤖

Whoa — hold up

JobsRadar was built for real people having a rough time in their job search — not for automated requests. You're clicking way too fast and you're now temporarily blocked.

Come back later. If you're genuinely job hunting, we've got your back — just act like a human.

Catch your next role the second it’s posted.

Create a free account and we’ll watch the boards for you — the instant a job matches your search, it lands in your inbox or Telegram. No digging, no refreshing.

Create free account

Free forever · takes 30 seconds · already have one?

Get an edge on your job hunt.

Join our Telegram channel for the stuff that helps you land the role — salary benchmarks, the weekly market pulse, and new-feature drops. No spam, just signal.

Join the channel — it's free