Staff Software Engineer (Cortex AI Search Infrastructure)

• The Cortex team is building the future of AI for enterprise data. This role focuses on the Search infrastructure that powers our flagship products like CoWork, Cortex Code & Cortex Agents fast, reliable, scalable and secure at the enterprise level

• You will be building high-performance retrieval engines (leveraging vector search, hybrid search, and semantic indexing) that power Snowflake Cortex. This involves optimizing how billions of rows of data are indexed and retrieved in milliseconds

• Architect Agentic Runtimes: Build and scale the orchestration engines that execute complex agentic workflows, ensuring low-latency tool execution and robust state management

• Scale Context Engineering Infra: Design high-performance systems for RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), including vector database integration, scalable and efficient search indexing, query processing, and result ranking, semantic caching, and automated metadata extraction

• Build the “Evals Engine”: Develop the automated infrastructure required to run massive-scale golden set simulations, error analysis pipelines, and “hillclimbing” experiments

• Productionize AI Workflows: Collaborate with the modeling team to take raw LLM capabilities and turn them into hardened, multi-tenant microservices with strict guardrails and observability

• Optimize Performance & Cost: Direct the infra strategy for model routing, prompt caching, and token optimization to ensure Snowflake’s AI features are the most efficient in the industry

Benefits

• Comprehensive health insurance plans

• Health savings accounts

• Robust retirement plans

• Life and disability insurance

• Weekly online lunch and learns

• Virtual workout classes

• Ergonomic work-from-home equipment

• On-demand mental health and wellness programs

• Fertility benefits and family planning resources

• Generous time-off and various leave plans

• Onsite and Remote Work

• Employee discounts and pre-tax selections

• New hire equity + Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)

• Quarterly bonus or commission program- Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field

• Systems Thinking: Strong understanding of database internals, distributed state management, and cloud-native architecture (Kubernetes, FoundationDB, etc.)

• Technical Stack: Deep proficiency in Go or Java (for systems) and Python (for AI orchestration)

• Experience: 9 + years of experience building distributed systems, high-throughput APIs, or backend infrastructure for AI/ML products

• Domain Expertise: Familiarity with the “plumbing” of AI: vector indices, agent platforms, and building scalable data pipelines

• Query optimization and SQL engine internals

• Designing multi-tenant systems that handle sensitive enterprise data at scale

• Developing search infrastructure for large-scale applications

• Direct experience with any of the subsystems outlined above