data
Posted 3 weeks agoPrincipal / Staff Applied Research Scientist
at Snowflake
On-site
Responsibilities
- (Weighted more heavily for Principal-level candidates.) - Track record of technical contribution to the field — publications, open-source work, patents, or comparable evidence of impact.
Requirements
- To usher in this new era, we seek AI-native thinkers across every function who are energized by the opportunity to reinvent how they work.
- You don’t just use tools; you possess an innate curiosity, treating AI as a high-trust collaborator that is core to how you solve problems and accelerate your impact.
- Snowflake's Data Engineering organization builds the platform that ingests, transforms, and stores data for modern lakehouse architectures — powering billions of queries, DML, and DDL operations with industry-leading price-performance.
- We are investing in a new line of applied research — building toward verified data infrastructure and trustworthy data systems — that brings formal methods, automated reasoning, and modern AI techniques to bear on the hardest problems in our distributed systems and developer tooling.
- WHAT YOU'LL DO - Lead research projects that apply formal methods, program analysis, automated reasoning, and AI-driven techniques (including code generation and modeling) to real problems in our cloud data platform.
- WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - PhD (or equivalent research experience) in Computer Science or a closely related field.
- - Software engineering — strong fundamentals; able to go from a research idea to production-quality code in collaboration with engineering teams.
- - AI / ML — practical
- experience applying modern ML, including LLMs, to systems problems such as code generation, synthesis, or automated reasoning.
- - Demonstrated ability to drive company-level initiatives in partnership with engineering and product leadership.
- Snowflake is growing fast, and we’re scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth.
Experience
- - 8+ years applying theoretical computer science to large-scale software systems — ideally cloud data platforms, distributed systems, or developer infrastructure.
Benefits
- 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
Contact
- benefits information: careers.snowflake.com http://careers.snowflake.com
Additional details
- At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise.
- We look for low-ego individuals who thrive in dynamic and fast-moving environments and move with an experimental mindset — who rapidly test emerging capabilities to discover simpler, more powerful ways to deliver results.
- We lead the industry's shift to open data lakes through our work on Iceberg and Polaris, and we deliver capabilities like Snowpark, Dynamic Tables, cross-region replication, time travel, and zero-copy cloning at enterprise scale.
- The goal is to improve correctness, reliability, and engineering velocity at a scale very few platforms operate at.
- We're hiring at both the Staff and Principal level; we'll calibrate the offer to the candidate's experience and scope of impact.
- - Translate research ideas into prototypes, then into shipped capabilities that move concrete business metrics — quality, velocity, reliability, and operational performance at scale.
- - Partner closely with engineering leaders, product managers, and key customers to identify high-leverage opportunities and turn them into deliverables.
- - Influence the engineering and product roadmap; advise leaders on which research directions are pragmatic and which are not.
- - Train and uplevel engineering teams on new methods, and scale those methods across the organization.
- - Maintain expertise at the frontier of the field through publications, conference participation, open-source contributions, and patent filings.