Staff Software Engineer — Cortex Code Platform

Snowflake•Menlo Park, CA

About The Position

Snowflake is about empowering enterprises to achieve their full potential — and people too. With a culture that’s all in on impact, innovation, and collaboration, Snowflake is the sweet spot for building big, moving fast, and taking technology — and careers — to the next level. The Cortex Code team is building the future of coding agents for working with data. See our flagship product in action: Cortex Code in Action: Live Demos + AMA. As a Staff Software Engineer on Cortex Code Platform, you will own the backend infrastructure that makes agent sessions, tools, and integrations reliable and secure at enterprise scale—including AI security, containerized execution, and distributed data systems under real customer load. You’ll partner closely with product, applied AI, and security to ship pragmatic platform improvements with clear operational guardrails.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field. Master’s or higher preferred but not a requirement.
8+ years shipping distributed systems / backend platform software in production, with Staff-level scope (architecture ownership, cross-team delivery, mentoring).
Production experience with container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes-class patterns) and distributed data systems (queues/streaming, partitioning, replication, failure modes).
Strong security fundamentals for cloud services (threat modeling, least privilege, secrets management) plus practical judgment for AI/agent risks.
Proficiency in Go and/or comparable backend languages; ability to contribute in TypeScript and/or Python as needed.
Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate effectively in a team environment.

Nice To Haves

Multi-tenant SaaS, workflow orchestration, or high-throughput async systems at scale.
Sandboxed execution, LLM serving/streaming patterns, or deep Snowflake platform integration experience.
Have built and owned complex platforms—many moving parts, meaningful state, and demanding operational requirements.
Thrive in high-intensity environments with short feedback loops and high standards for rigor.
Take problems to completion: you care about production reliability, clear metrics, and sustainable engineering velocity.
Act as a force multiplier through architecture, tooling, and mentorship—especially where security, containers, and data systems intersect.

Responsibilities

Platform architecture & delivery: Design and build scalable services, APIs, and core primitives for orchestration, session lifecycle, tool execution boundaries, and Snowflake ecosystem integration.
AI security & safe execution: Threat-model agent workflows; enforce least-privilege access to customer context, safe secret/credential handling, and controls that reduce injection, tool misuse, and exfiltration risk without blocking velocity.
Container infrastructure: Operate secure, cost-aware container execution for agents—images, isolation, limits/scheduling, networking, and production operability (warm pools, cold starts, rollouts).
Distributed data systems: Build and evolve data-intensive platform components (durable workflows, queues/streaming where needed, caching, backpressure, consistency tradeoffs) with strong observability and capacity discipline.
Leadership & production excellence: Drive cross-team execution through design docs and mentorship; define SLOs, incident patterns, and rollout practices; stay hands-on in code (we use Go, TypeScript, Python, and cloud-native building blocks—mix varies by project).