Engineering Manager, Data Processing

About the role

Snowflake is hiring an Engineering Manager to lead its Data Processing team in Zurich, within Observe, an AI-powered observability platform built on the Snowflake AI Data Cloud. The team owns the core engine behind Observe, including the query language compiler, the query execution pipeline, the autoscaling scheduler and incremental view maintenance. The manager starts with a small team and will grow it.

Key responsibilities

• Lead, mentor and grow a team of backend engineers working on compiler internals, distributed scheduling, query execution and data materialization, coaching them on their careers.
• Hire top talent and represent Observe and Snowflake to candidates.
• Work with other Observe product and backend teams to plan and execute new features and scale existing systems.
• Work with core Snowflake engineering teams in Germany and the US to integrate Observe with Snowflake technologies.
• Reduce technical debt strategically, balancing it against new feature work.
• Keep many projects moving in parallel, set priorities and ensure nothing important slips through.
• Own operational health: performance, compute cost efficiency, on-call load and support cost; lead the team through production incidents and customer escalations, and drive postmortems.
• Stay close to the code: write, review and fix code when needed, and work on real production workloads.

Required profile

• Proven record managing a team of 5+ engineers delivering complex backend or infrastructure systems in a fast-paced environment.
• Background in database systems such as query processing, query optimization, storage or compilers.
• Solid experience building and operating distributed systems.
• Hands-on engineering skills: able to write, review and fix production code.
• Able to run many concurrent projects, balance short-term operations with long-term architecture, and make cost and performance tradeoffs based on data.
• Experience running a team that owns production services with on-call responsibilities.
• Bachelor's, master's or doctorate degree in computer science, engineering or a related field.

Required skills

• Bonus points: experience with Snowflake or other large-scale data platforms or databases and knowledge of their internals.
• Bonus points: familiarity with the observability space.
• Bonus points: experience building an enterprise-grade SaaS product.