Principal Software Engineer II, Data Platform (Streaming, Dynamic Tables and More)

Principal Software Engineer II, Data Platform (Streaming, Dynamic Tables and More)

Snowflake

Berlin, Germany

As a Principal Engineer on the Data Platform team, you will be a technical anchor — setting direction, solving the hardest engineering problems, and elevating the entire team. You will work at the intersection of systems design, long-term architecture, and real-world engineering execution. In this specific role, you will lead the evolution of our declarative data pipelines, focusing on streaming ingestion and transformations.

What You'll Do

• Drive the technical strategy and architecture for key Data Platform initiatives, focusing heavily on real-time data movement and incremental processing.
• Lead design reviews and set engineering standards across teams.
• Identify and resolve high-impact technical challenges and systemic bottlenecks to reduce latency and improve the efficiency of dynamic tables at cloud scale.
• Mentor and grow senior engineers; raise the engineering bar.
• Partner closely with product and infrastructure leadership on roadmap and direction.
• Continuous hands-on technical deliverables in the most critical areas.

What We're Looking For

• 14+ years of software engineering experience with deep expertise in distributed systems.
• Demonstrated track record of defining and delivering platform-scale technical initiatives.
• Expert-level knowledge of streaming and/or batch data systems (Flink, Spark, or equivalent), with specialized knowledge in incremental materialization algorithms.
• Strong systems thinking — ability to reason across layers of complexity (infra, storage, compute, API).
• A passion for engaging directly with customers to gain insight and inspiration.
• Experience influencing technical direction across organizations.
• Excellent written and verbal communication for technical and executive audiences.

Desirable

• Experience with AI-augmented development practices and integrating LLM-based tooling into engineering workflows.
• Familiarity with Snowflake platform internals or cloud-native data systems.
• Experience with metadata systems, query optimization, or data catalog infrastructure.
• Contributions to open source, such as top-level Apache projects.