Principal Engineer

At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise. 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. 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. At Snowflake, your role isn't just to execute a function, but to help redefine the future of how work gets done.

Streamlit in Snowflake (SiS) is our flagship app development platform, enabling data engineers, analysts, and developers to build and deploy interactive, data-driven applications directly within Snowflake. As Principal Engineer for the Streamlit in Snowflake team, you will be the top technical voice shaping how millions of users build and deploy apps on Snowflake's data platform.

This role requires a rare combination: deep hands-on engineering expertise in Python/container runtimes, a systems architect's instinct for platform design, and the organizational influence to drive cross-team programs. You will define how SiS evolves from its container-native SPCS runtime and embedding/iframe SDK, to its developer experience, performance at scale, and integration with Snowflake's broader AI and data ecosystem.

• Define and own the architectural vision for the SiS platform spanning the SPCS container runtime, the warehouse runtime, the embedding SDK, developer tooling, and the Snowsight integration layer.

• Drive the platform's evolution toward its next-generation capabilities building on publicly shipping features like chromeless viewer URLs and IdP integration, and shaping the architectural direction for areas still in development.

• Serve as the primary technical representative for SiS in company-wide architecture forums, shaping Snowflake's broader app platform strategy.

• Establish engineering standards for performance, reliability, and scale ensuring SiS can handle many concurrent users with fast startup times and high availability.

• Lead the technical design and review process for high-stakes, cross-functional initiatives: working closely with infrastructure, Snowsight, Cortex/AI, security, and the open-source Streamlit project.

• Be a strong hands-on contributor by authoring specs, implementing changes, reviewing PRs, and setting a high bar for code quality, API design, and system architecture.

• Mentor and grow senior engineers on the team; identify and incubate the next generation of technical leaders. Level up the team through your example and high standards and knowledge sharing.

• Partner with Product and Design to drive the roadmap and translate customer needs (performance, scale, OSS parity) into robust engineering solutions.

• Advocate for SiS developers and end users by balancing the developer experience of Python engineers with the scalability needs of enterprise customers embedding Streamlit.

• 15+ years of software engineering experience, with a demonstrated track record of architecting and shipping production-grade developer platforms or application runtimes.

• Strong expertise in Python application runtimes, server-side frameworks, and distributed execution environments with a deep understanding of performance, reliability, and lifecycle management at scale.

• Strong understanding of container-based execution environments (Docker, Kubernetes, SPCS or similar) and the performance/reliability tradeoffs they introduce.

• Hands-on experience designing and evolving developer-facing SDKs, embedding APIs, or component libraries including thoughtful API versioning and backward compatibility.

• Demonstrated ability to lead technical programs that span multiple teams and organizational boundaries driving clarity, alignment, and accountability without direct authority.

• Experience with enterprise SaaS reliability requirements: multi-tenancy, scale, security review processes, and graceful migrations.

• Familiarity with the open-source Streamlit framework or similar Python-based app frameworks is a strong plus.

• Experience working with IdP integrations, OAuth flows, or authentication systems for embedded/public-facing web applications is a plus.

• (nice to have) Familiarity with the web platform (TypeScript/JavaScript, browser APIs, WebSockets, service workers, iframe/cross-origin security models) particularly as it relates to how Python-backed apps are served and embedded in the browser