Staff Software Engineer, Cortex AI Search Infrastructure

What this role involves

This role is for a Staff Software Engineer on the Cortex AI Search Infrastructure team at Snowflake. The engineer will build high-performance retrieval engines and agentic runtimes, scale context engineering infrastructure, and develop automated evaluation systems. Requires 9+ years of experience in distributed systems and backend infrastructure, with proficiency in Go or Java and Python.

Skills this posting asks for

• go
• java
• python
• kubernetes
• foundationdb
• vector search
• hybrid search
• semantic indexing
• rag
• vector database
• query optimization
• sql engine internals
• multi-tenant systems
• search infrastructure
• distributed systems
• high-throughput apis
• backend infrastructure
• ai/ml
• orchestration engines
• state management
• microservices
• observability
• model routing
• prompt caching

Requirements

• 9 years of experience
• Level: staff

From the employer’s posting

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 collabor…