Senior Engineering Manager - Cortex AI Functions

Snowflake is about empowering enterprises to achieve their full potential — and people too. With a culture that’s all in on impact, innovation, and collaboration, Snowflake is the sweet spot for building big, moving fast, and taking technology — and careers — to the next level.

Snowflake is redefining enterprise AI by unifying frontier research, and huge scale engineering into a single, cohesive platform. At the center of this effort is the Cortex AI Functions team — the group directly responsible for inventing, publishing, and productionizing Snowflake’s most advanced AI technologies.

Our team is the creator of innovations such as Arctic-TILT, Arctic-Extract, and the broader Cortec AI Functions, along with numerous advancements in text understanding, extraction architectures, retrieval augmentation, and domain-adaptive fine-tuning. We design new model architectures, training strategies, evaluation methodologies, and scaling techniques — then deploy them seamlessly into Cortex so customers can access state of the art AI with a single SQL function.

But research is only half of the mission. Cortex AI Functions also owns the engineering that brings these innovations to life across the Snowflake platform. We build the high-performance serving layers, microservice architectures, data pipelines, and reliability frameworks that allow our models to operate at enterprise scale with predictable latency, governance, and cost.

This role is ideal for someone who thrives in both worlds — someone who can guide foundational research, shape model architecture direction, and also lead engineering teams to deliver production-ready AI systems that impact thousands of customers. If you are energized by the opportunity to set scientific vision and to ship robust systems at scale, Cortex AI Functions offers a uniquely rare environment to do both.

AS ENGINEERING MANAGER - CORTEX AI FUNCTIONS YOU WILL:

- Champion developer productivity and velocity, ensuring your teams have the tools, frameworks, and clarity required to deliver high-impact AI capabilities.

- Directly manage a talented team of Engineers, Researchers and Managers and will provide:

- Support, guidance and feedback

- Career guidance

- Enable staff to do what they love

- Recruit, interview, and hire exceptional talent to support the rapid expansion of the AI Functions

- Partner closely with Researchers, Engineers, and Product Managers to define execution plans, coordinate resources, and align on milestones that ensure timely delivery of AI features and platform capabilities

- Build and scale an engineering and research organization with a strong execution mindset, balancing deep research exploration with predictable delivery of production-ready systems

- Lead large, complicated projects alongside Individual Contributor and technology leads

- Participate in the design and implementation of new features and products

- Participate in cross-team discussions and initiatives with the goal of moving the larger group forward on our vision

- Utilize your experience and problem solving skills to help prevent and investigate production issues

- Have 5+ years of software engineering management experience with 2+ years in managing other engineering managers and leaders.

IDEAL ENGINEERING MANAGER AT SNOWFLAKE NEEDS TO DEMONSTRATE THE FOLLOWING:

- A successful track record in managing talented engineers and managers

- Ability to align long-term business strategy with pragmatic technical and research investments, including making tradeoffs between foundational in-house research, extending existing models, or leveraging external AI systems

- Ability to build frameworks, processes, and decision criteria for evaluating AI research investments

- Understanding of Data Infrastructure systems and microservice architecture built on Public Cloud platforms.

- Experience architecting, building and maintaining platforms built on microservice architecture for large scale SaaS platforms. Focus on memory, cpu and networking performance.

- Strong knowledge of various package tools and methodologies for system components built with Python or Java.

- Proven history of managing software development, automation and software engineering teams.

- Formal software engineering background (aka CS degree).

- Prior experience with distributed systems.

- Ability to translate business strategy into action

- Ability to communicate well with leadership in articulating results and complex concepts

Snowflake is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, color, gender identity or expression, marital status, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, race, religion, pregnancy, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances.

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 http://careers.snowflake.com