Principal Research Scientist

Build the future of the AI Data Cloud. Join the Snowflake team.

The mission of the Snowflake Data Engineering organization is to provide the best platform to ingest, transform and operate large-scale interoperable storage, powering modern lakehouse architectures. Guided by Snowflake's "no knobs" philosophy, we develop cloud infrastructure that allows data engineers and analysts to get value from their rich variety of data sources quickly. We deliver best-in-class data ingestion capabilities that allow ingestion from a variety of sources, manage orchestration and transformation. We provide high-performance developer capabilities with Snowpark and Dynamic Tables to enable data transformations. We deliver interoperable storage capabilities allowing customers to build open data lakes spanning data maintained within Snowflake and other storage solutions. We lead the industry’s transformation into open data lakes through our contribution to innovations in Iceberg and Polaris. At the core of it all is our rich metadata system, powering billions of queries, DML and DDL operations with the best price-performance characteristics. Our metadata systems also provide industry-leading governance capabilities including cross-region/cross-cloud replication, time travel and zero copy cloning, meeting the needs of enterprise-scale data lakes. 

To meet our ambitious plans in each of these pillars, we’re looking for Research Scientists who can explore innovations across AI-driven code generation, modeling and automated reasoning and apply them to accelerate our growth.

• Initiate the design, development and execution of technology research projects

• Investigate the feasibility of applying scientific principles and concepts to potential inventions and products.

• Plan and execute applied research, concretely improving business metrics including overall quality, velocity and other operational performance metrics at scale. 

• Actively partner with business leaders to identify opportunities, prototype and rapidly apply research ideas to solve concrete business problems

• Identify opportunities to train engineering teams on new methods of solving complex engineering problems and scale them across the organization

• Advise engineering leaders on pragmatic applications of research ideas to solve complex business, technical and customer problems

• Engage with key customers to understand emerging customer needs and identify opportunities to accelerate delivery of these features through applied research

• Contribute to strategic product and engineering roadmap

• Maintain substantial knowledge of state-of-the-art principles and theories, and may contribute to scientific literature and conferences. Participate in development of patent applications. May coordinate interdepartmental activities and research efforts.

• PhD or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Automated Reasoning or a related technical field.

• 8+ years of experience applying theoretical computer science concepts to large scale software development, including large-scale cloud data platforms and distributed systems

• Comfortable working in a fast-paced, dynamic environment with a focus on delivering impactful results.

• Prior experience driving company initiatives and growth of the business in collaboration with engineering leaders and product managers.

• Demonstrated track record of contributing to the advancement of chosen technical fields through publications, contributions to open source projects and patent applications for innovations. 

Every Snowflake employee is expected to follow the company’s confidentiality and security standards for handling sensitive data. Snowflake employees must abide by the company’s data security plan as an essential part of their duties. It is every employee's duty to keep customer information secure and confidential.

Snowflake is growing fast, and we’re scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth. We are looking for people who share our values, challenge ordinary thinking, and push the pace of innovation while building a future for themselves and Snowflake.

How do you want to make your impact?

For jobs located in the United States, please visit the job posting on the Snowflake Careers Site for salary and benefits information: careers.snowflake.com