Snowflake
Posted 6d ago

Senior Software Engineer, Cortex Quality

Snowflake
Menlo Park, California, United States
$200k-$270k/yrOnsiteFull Time
Responsibilities
  • designing agents
  • building evals
  • debugging failures
Requirements
  • Bachelor's degree in a related field
  • 6+ years shipping production software including AI/LLM features, and fluency in Python
  • TypeScript, or Go
Technical tools mentioned
PythonTypeScriptGo

Job description

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.

Cortex Code is Snowflake’s coding agent for building with data. It ships inside the platform that thousands of the world’s largest enterprises — including a large share of the Forbes Global 2000 — run their data on, which means the quality of this agent is felt by the data teams behind a meaningful slice of the global economy. We are taking coding agents from impressive demos to tools Data Science and Engineering teams depend on every day, and we hold them to a rigorous, public bar: see our data engineering agent benchmark.

About the Role

This is a measurement-first role that owns the quality and efficiency of Cortex Code end to end: how good the agent is, how much it costs to run, and how reliably it behaves in production. You will take agents from research capability to real, measurable user value — turning fuzzy “the agent feels worse” signals into hard metrics, running the experiments that move them, and shipping the changes that stick. You will work on a small, high-powered modeling and infrastructure team where your work reaches every developer building on Snowflake.

What you will do in this role

  • Take agents from prototype to production: design and refine agent behaviors for real coding and data-engineering workflows, and make them reliable enough to depend on.

  • Own agent quality end to end: build eval harnesses, diagnose failure modes from real agent trajectories, and run experiments that hillclimb the metrics that matter.

  • Drive down cost and latency without regressing quality: prompt caching, context compaction, tool-result offloading, and cheaper model routing for sub-tasks. At Snowflake scale, efficiency is user value.

  • Debug production failures and systematically increase robustness: close the loop from a customer’s broken run back to a fix and a regression test.

  • Build the data pipelines that feed real-world task insights back into evals and modeling.

  • Onboard and bake off frontier models: measure their strengths and failure modes, and decide where each belongs in the product.

  • Partner with product and infra: shape user-facing agent behavior, and set the metrics and standards that define a successfully completed complex task.

Requirements

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Statistics, or a related field. Master’s or higher preferred but not a requirement.

  • 6+ years of experience shipping software in production, including AI/LLM features.

  • Fluency in at least one of Python, TypeScript, or Go, and willingness to work across all three

  • A measurement-first, systems-thinking instinct: you optimize for user outcomes over isolated metrics, and you can design an eval that is not fooling you (sampling, ground-truth quality, leakage, noise).

  • Comfort debugging complex, unpredictable, real-world failures.

  • Strong communication skills: you can make a quality or cost result legible to engineers, product, and leadership, and collaborate effectively in a team environment.

Nice to have

  • Deep hands-on experience with agentic coding tools and real intuition for model strengths, failure modes, and prompting limits.

  • Prior work on eval harnesses, LLM observability, or safety/guardrails in production.

  • Background in data engineering, data modeling, analytics, retrieval/RAG, or semantic layers, which is highly relevant for data-centric coding agents.

  • Experience working with large-scale datasets or production system logs.

You may be a particularly good fit if you

  • Are a power user of modern coding agents and want to turn that intuition into systematic measurement and improvement.

  • Have built and owned complex systems — pipelines, orchestration, or software with substantial state, branching logic, and operational requirements.

  • Thrive in high-intensity environments with short feedback loops and high standards for rigor.

  • Take problems to completion independently: you don’t stop at a prototype; you care about production reliability and clear metrics.

  • Are genuinely bothered by numbers that do not reconcile.

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

About Snowflake

Cloud-based platform for data storage, processing, and analytics.

Similar jobs

Software Engineer roles near Menlo Park, California
1h
Save
Mark Applied
Hide
Software Engineer Graduate (TikTok Search Data Infra) - 2027 Start
San Jose or Los Angeles or Singapore or New York City or London or Dublin or Paris or Berlin or Dubai or Jakarta or Seoul or Tokyo
$128k-$317k/yr OnsiteFull Time
TikTok
TikTok: Global short-form video hosting and social media platform.
Bachelor's degree in computer science or related technical field in progress; strong Java, C++, or Python skills; production data framework experience; distributed systems fundamentals.
Java, C++, Python, Spark, Flink, Hive, Iceberg
2h
Save
Mark Applied
Hide
Software Engineer I, Network
San Francisco or Sunnyvale
$117k-$138k/yr OnsiteFull Time
Crusoe
Crusoe: Provides energy-efficient cloud infrastructure powered by stranded and renewable energy.
1+ YOEEarly-career software engineer with hands-on systems experience, knowledge of Java or Go, Linux fundamentals, testing, source control, and basic CI/CD; bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
Git, Java, Go, Linux, BGP, VXLAN, TCP/IP, Open vSwitch (OVS)
2h
Save
Mark Applied
Hide
Senior Software Engineer, Core UI
San Mateo, California, United States
$196k-$295k/yr HybridFull Time
Roblox
RobloxNYSE: RBLX: Platform for creating and playing user-generated 3D digital experiences.
4+ YOERequires 4+ years of software development experience, modern frontend expertise with React or similar frameworks, component-based architecture, state management, frontend design principles, and cross-functional collaboration.
React, Lua, React Native, C++
2h
Save
Mark Applied
Hide
Principal Software Engineer - AI Experiences, Copilot
Mountain View or Redmond
HybridFull Time
Microsoft
MicrosoftNASDAQ: MSFT: Develops software, services, devices, and cloud computing solutions.
4+ YOEBachelor's degree in computer science or related technical field and 4+ years of coding experience, or equivalent. Backend APIs, scalable cloud services, distributed systems, and AI experience preferred.
C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, GraphQL, Protobuf, Thrift, WebSocket, SSE, WebRTC, Azure, AWS, GCP, RDBMS
2h
Save
Mark Applied
Hide
Staff Software Engineer, Frontend/Fullstack - Moveworks
Mountain View, California, United States
$167k-$291k/yr OnsiteFull Time
ServiceNow
ServiceNowNYSE: NOW: Enterprise cloud platform for digital workflow automation.
5+ YOEBachelor's degree in computer science or related field, or equivalent experience; 5+ years building complex web applications; modern web UI framework experience; strong product sense and cross-functional collaboration skills.
ReactJS, Generative AI, Machine Learning (ML)
2h
Save
Mark Applied
Hide
Staff Software Engineer, Frontend/Fullstack - Moveworks
Mountain View, California, United States
$167k-$291k/yr OnsiteFull Time
ServiceNow
ServiceNowNYSE: NOW: Provides a cloud platform for automating enterprise digital workflows.
5+ YOEBachelor's degree or equivalent experience, 5+ years developing complex web applications, modern web UI framework experience such as ReactJS, scalable UI development, product sense, and cross-functional collaboration skills.
ReactJS, ML, Generative AI, APIs
3h
Save
Mark Applied
Hide
Software Engineer, Trainium
San Francisco, California, United States
$295k-$380k/yr HybridFull Time
OpenAI
OpenAI: Develops artificial intelligence models and generative AI software services.
3+ YOERequires 3+ years of relevant engineering experience, strong systems programming and performance-critical software skills, and experience with specialized accelerators such as GPU, TPU, or Trainium.
AWS Trainium, AWS Neuron SDK, PyTorch, JAX, LLVM, MLIR, XLA, Triton
4h
Save
Mark Applied
Hide
Senior Software Engineer, Security
San Francisco, California, United States
$188k-$282k/yr OnsiteFull Time
Harvey
Harvey: AI platform for legal research and document analysis.
5+ YOERequires 5+ years of software engineering experience, security infrastructure expertise, production service ownership, programming skills, cloud infrastructure experience, and experience with agentic coding tools.
Claude Code, Codex, Azure, GCP, AWS, SCIM, OIDC, SAML, OPA, Cedar, Zanzibar