Engineering Manager, Release Validation

About the Team

Snowflake engineering takes pride in building highly reliable and scalable products. In the era of autonomous AI agents and continuous deployment, a traditional testing model breaks down under massive PR volume. Our AI pilled engineers treat validation as a scalable, developer-first platform. The Release Validation Team builds test frameworks that make continuous deployment safe, cost-efficient, and agent-friendly. Our customers are Snowflake engineers and their army of agents. How do Snowflake engineers keep their agents running autonomous for hours and days, landing quality PRs with human interventions? They rely on layers of validation that agents can execute in high-fidelity production simulation.

We give Snowflake the confidence to ship at speed without compromising Snowflake’s core brand promise: extreme reliability.

In this role, you will:

• Lead and grow the team. Hire, mentor, and develop engineers working on test infrastructure, automation, and developer tooling. Build a culture of ownership, technical excellence, and focus on the customer.

• Set strategy and roadmap. Define and drive the multi-quarter vision for release validation: faster signals, fewer blockers, better test quality, and lower cost.

• Own the validation platform. Be accountable for the reliability, scalability, and efficiency of our distributed regression and workload test frameworks, pre-production environments, and release validation pipeline.

• Improve test health across the company. Work with feature teams to reduce flaky, non-hermetic, duplicate, and low-value tests, and set standards and incentives that keep them healthy.

• Cut down release blockers. Lead efforts to improve how failures are traced to their cause, filter out noise from infrastructure problems, and speed up triage so real regressions reach the owning team quickly.

• Drive AI and automation. Invest in AI-driven failure analysis and automated routing that remove manual work for engineers across Snowflake.

• Work across teams. Act as the main partner to Release Engineering and engineering leaders on release quality

What We're Looking For

• 3-5 years of experience hiring, coaching, and developing engineers at different career stages.

• Experience building and running large-scale CI/CD, test infrastructure, or developer productivity platforms, ideally for complex distributed systems.

• A strong technical background, with enough depth to review designs, make architecture tradeoffs, and earn the respect of senior engineers.

• A solid grasp of test strategy: regression vs. workload testing, hermeticity, flakiness, coverage tradeoffs, and release gating.

• Experience driving work across many teams and influencing without authority.

• A data-driven leadership style: you set measurable goals and use metrics to prioritize and show impact.

• Strong communication skills, including explaining complex technical tradeoffs to both engineers and executives.

• BS/MS in Computer Science or related majors, or equivalent experience.