# Principal Software Engineer - Performance Engineering (Cloud Infrastructure)

**Company**: Snowflake
**Location**: Menlo Park, CA
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Salary**: $264K – $379.5K
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology

**Apply**: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/snowflake/351f89c9-7502-4c5c-b600-b3a1192c45eb?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_dcc0ff0e-bbf

## Description

At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise.

We seek 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 while also translating that technical depth into pricing, capacity, and roadmap decisions across Snowflake.

## Responsibilities

- Own new hardware evaluation and enablement. Lead evaluation of new AWS, Azure, and GCP instance types 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 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 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.

## Requirements

- 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, 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 to root-cause performance bottlenecks.

- Experience building or operating large-scale benchmarking systems and turning benchmark output into actionable optimization strategies and pricing/rollout decisions.

- Ability to build quantitative models connecting technical performance metrics to business outcomes.

- A track record of leading cross-functional, cross-company initiatives.

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

## Nice to Have

- Experience with data warehouse / distributed database performance characteristics.

- Direct experience partnering with cloud providers or silicon vendors on early-access hardware programs.

- Experience building hardware-emulation systems.

## Skills

### Required
- cloud infrastructure performance
- hardware/systems fundamentals
- benchmarking systems
- quantitative models
- cross-functional leadership
- automation

### Nice to have
- data warehouse / distributed database performance characteristics
- partnering with cloud providers or silicon vendors
- building hardware-emulation systems

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Source: [Apply at jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/snowflake/351f89c9-7502-4c5c-b600-b3a1192c45eb?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)