Principal Software Engineer 2 - OLTP

The role

This person will define and drive the long-term technical architecture for OLTP across Snowflake Postgres and Unistore. They will design transactional systems for agent-driven workloads and lead complex, cross-organizational engineering efforts.

What you will do

• Define and drive the long-term technical architecture for OLTP across Snowflake Postgres, Unistore and the infrastructure they depend on.
• Lead major architectural decisions across transactions, storage, concurrency control, replication, recovery, query execution and database scalability.
• Shape the compute and storage architecture for low-latency, highly available transactional systems.
• Build database primitives for agent-driven workloads.
• Define how agents safely read and modify operational state.
• Determine where PostgreSQL architecture and compatibility provide leverage.
• Design for workloads where databases and transactional environments are created and operated programmatically.
• Lead complex, cross-organizational engineering efforts and establish technical direction across multiple teams.
• Work closely with product leaders, senior engineering leadership, and strategic customers.
• Raise the technical bar through architecture reviews, mentoring and hands-on leadership.

Required qualifications

• 15+ years of experience building databases, distributed systems, storage systems or large-scale cloud infrastructure.
• Deep expertise in OLTP and database systems, including transactions, concurrency control, storage engines, indexing, query processing, replication, recovery and high availability.
• Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure for low-latency stateful systems.
• Experience designing highly elastic, multi-tenant, or rapidly provisioned stateful systems.
• Strong instincts for how database architecture should evolve for AI-native applications and autonomous agents.
• Experience making difficult architectural tradeoffs across latency, throughput, consistency, availability, durability, scalability, isolation and cost.
• A track record of taking technically ambitious systems from architecture through production at meaningful scale.
• Experience influencing technical direction across multiple teams or a broad product area.
• Strong systems engineering instincts and the ability to work across abstractions.
• Exceptional technical judgment and communication skills.

Nice to have

• Deep PostgreSQL expertise
• C, C++, or Rust experience

About the company

Snowflake is building the next generation of transactional systems for applications, AI and agents. The company is powering the era of the agentic enterprise.