Snowflake
Principal Software Engineer - Performance Engineering (Cloud Infrastructure)
$264K–$380K
US-CA-Menlo Park · Principal · Full-time · Posted Sep 17, 2026
- Experience
- 12+ years in performance, systems, or infrastructure engineering, with a track record of principal-level technical leadership.
About the job
Leads cloud infrastructure performance strategy, evaluating and benchmarking new hardware and translating results into pricing, capacity, rollout, and roadmap decisions.
What you'll do
- Evaluate new cloud-provider hardware and build benchmarking, modeling, and automated validation capabilities.
- Analyze hardware performance and use benchmark results to guide architecture, pricing, rollout, and adoption decisions.
- Lead cross-functional and cloud-provider partnerships; mentor engineers and develop company-wide performance engineering practices.
What they ask for
- Deep expertise in cloud infrastructure performance across at least one major CSP, including instance types, pricing models, and capacity constraints.
- Strong grounding in CPU microarchitecture, memory bandwidth, I/O subsystems, and profiling tools such as PMU counters.
- Experience building or operating large-scale benchmarking systems and converting results into optimization and business decisions.
- Experience building quantitative models connecting performance metrics to business outcomes, and leading cross-functional, cross-company initiatives.
Nice to have
- Data warehouse or distributed database performance experience; early-access hardware partnership experience.
- Experience building hardware-emulation systems.
Pay
$264K – $379.5K (base salary; currency not stated)
Tools
AWS, Azure, GCP, AWS Graviton, AMD Turin, Azure ARM/Cobalt, GCP Axion, TPC-DS
AI focus
The posting describes AI-native ways of working but no AI-specific job duties.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative