Principal Software Engineer - Performance Engineering (Cloud Infrastructure)

About the Team

The Capacity, Performance & Efficiency team sits at the intersection of cloud infrastructure, workload behavior, performance measurement, and business economics. We drive Snowflake’s cloud infrastructure adoption and evolution strategy, price/performance decisions, platform footprint expansion amidst capacity constraints, and strategic alignment with cloud service provider (CSP) technical roadmaps.

We're looking for a Principal Performance Engineer to drive Snowflake's cloud infrastructure performance strategy. This is a high-autonomy, high-impact role for someone who can go deep on hardware internals (CPU microarchitecture, memory bandwidth, I/O behavior) while also translating that technical depth into pricing, capacity, and roadmap decisions across Snowflake.

What You'll Do

• Own new hardware evaluation and enablement. Lead evaluation of new AWS, Azure, and GCP instance types (e.g., AWS Graviton, AMD Turin, Azure ARM/Cobalt, GCP Axion) by building representative benchmark and evaluation solutions.

• Set performance strategy and architecture. Shape the team's technical roadmap, set direction on measurement methodology, and translate benchmark results into concrete rollout and adoption recommendations.

• Lead cross-functional and CSP partnerships. Work across engineering (i.e. Warehouse, Capacity, and other core platform teams) and Finance along with AWS, Azure, GCP to qualify new hardware and influence future cloud-instance designs.

• Characterize hardware performance at a deep level. Analyze CPU microarchitecture (e.g., memory bandwidth, PMU counters, I/O behavior) to identify workload-specific bottlenecks and drive resolution.

• Develop price/performance model to support new hardware transitions.

• Automate day-zero hardware readiness. Build automated performance-validation workflows and per-provider/per-instance scorecards so Snowflake can qualify and price new silicon at or near cloud-provider GA.

• Grow the performance engineering discipline. Mentor engineers, build out benchmarking capability, and drive company-wide performance education (e.g., a recurring Performance Tech Talk series).

Our ideal candidate will have:

• 12+ years of experience in performance engineering, systems engineering, or infrastructure engineering, with a track record of principal-level technical leadership.

• Deep expertise in cloud infrastructure performance across at least one major CSP (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including instance types, pricing models, and capacity constraints.

• Strong grounding in hardware/systems fundamentals: CPU microarchitecture, memory bandwidth, I/O subsystems, and use of profiling tools (PMU counters, etc.) to root-cause performance bottlenecks.

• Experience building or operating large-scale benchmarking systems (e.g., TPC-DS-style workloads) and turning benchmark output into actionable optimization strategies and pricing/rollout decisions.

• Ability to build quantitative models connecting technical performance metrics to business outcomes (pricing multipliers, cost-per-query).

• A track record of leading cross-functional, cross-company initiatives — comfortable being the primary technical point of contact with external hardware and cloud partners (CSPs, silicon vendors).

• Bias toward automation: builds scorecards, dashboards, and validation pipelines rather than relying on one-off analysis.