Staff Software Engineer (Cortex AI Search Infrastructure)

• The Cortex team is building the future of AI for enterprise data. This role focuses on the Search infrastructure that powers our flagship products like CoWork, Cortex Code & Cortex Agents fast, reliable, scalable and secure at the enterprise level
• You will be building high-performance retrieval engines (leveraging vector search, hybrid search, and semantic indexing) that power Snowflake Cortex. This involves optimizing how billions of rows of data are indexed and retrieved in milliseconds
• 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

Benefits

• Comprehensive health insurance plans
• Health savings accounts
• Robust retirement plans
• Life and disability insurance
• Weekly online lunch and learns
• Virtual workout classes
• Ergonomic work-from-home equipment
• On-demand mental health and wellness programs
• Fertility benefits and family planning resources
• Generous time-off and various leave plans
• Onsite and Remote Work
• Employee discounts and pre-tax selections
• New hire equity + Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)
• Quarterly bonus or commission program- Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field
• Systems Thinking: Strong understanding of database internals, distributed state management, and cloud-native architecture (Kubernetes, FoundationDB, etc.)
• Technical Stack: Deep proficiency in Go or Java (for systems) and Python (for AI orchestration)
• Experience: 9 + years of experience building distributed systems, high-throughput APIs, or backend infrastructure for AI/ML products
• Domain Expertise: Familiarity with the “plumbing” of AI: vector indices, agent platforms, and building scalable data pipelines
• 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