Senior Data Platform Architect

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.

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.

Our Solution Engineering organization is seeking a Senior Data Platform Architect (Specialist) to join our Applied Field Engineering team who can provide technical leadership in working with both technical and business executives in the design and architecture of the Snowflake Cloud Data Platform as a critical component of their enterprise data architecture and overall ecosystem. In this role you will work directly with the sales team to understand the needs of our customers, strategize on how to navigate winning sales cycles, provide compelling value-based demonstrations, support enterprise Proof of Concepts, and ultimately close business. You will leverage your expertise, best practices and reference architectures highlighting Snowflake’s Data Platform capabilities across data ingestion, transformation, and lakehouse workloads. You are equally comfortable in both a business and technical context, interacting with executives and talking shop with technical audiences.

IN THIS ROLE YOU WILL GET TO:

• Apply your multi-cloud data architecture expertise while presenting Snowflake technology and vision to executives and technical contributors at strategic prospects, customers, and partners

• Work hands-on with prospects and customers to demonstrate and communicate the value of Snowflake technology throughout the sales cycle, from demo to proof of concept to design and implementation

• Immerse yourself in the ever-evolving industry, maintaining a deep understanding of competitive and complementary technologies and vendors and how to position Snowflake in relation to them

• Collaborate with Product Management, Engineering, and Marketing to continuously improve Snowflake’s products and marketing

ON DAY ONE, WE WILL EXPECT YOU TO HAVE:

• 10+ years of architecture and data engineering experience within the Enterprise Data space

• 5+ years experience within a pre-sales environment (Sales Engineer, Solutions Engineer, Solutions Architect, etc…)

• Fluency or Native German will be required.

• Outstanding presentation skills to both technical and executive audiences, whether impromptu on a whiteboard or using presentations and demos.

• Ability to connect a customer’s specific business problems and Snowflake’s solutions

• Ability to do deep discovery of customer’s architecture framework and connect those with Snowflake Data Architecture.

• Broad range of experience within large-scale Database and/or Data Warehouse technology, ETL, analytics and cloud technologies. For example, Data Lake, Data Mesh, Data Fabric

• Hands on Development experience with technologies such as SQL, Python, Pandas, Spark, PySpark, Hadoop, Hive and any other Big data technologies

• Deep understanding of data integration services and tools for building ETL and ELT data pipelines such as Apache NiFi, Matillion, Fivetran, Qlik, or Informatica.

• Familiarity with streaming technologies (ex. Kafka, Flink, Spark Streaming, Kinesis) and real-time or near real time use cases (ex. CDC)

• Experience designing interoperable data lakehouse architectures and experience working with Iceberg, Delta, and Parquet

• Strong architectural expertise in data engineering to confidently present and demo to business executives and technical audiences, and effectively handle any impromptu questions

• Bachelor’s Degree required, Masters Degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics or related fields, or equivalent experience preferred

Every Snowflake employee is expected to follow the company’s confidentiality and security standards for handling sensitive data. Snowflake employees must abide by the company’s data security plan as an essential part of their duties. It is every employee's duty to keep customer information secure and confidential.

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.

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

• Highlight deep experience with Snowflake’s cloud data platform (e.g., multi‑cluster warehouses, Snowpipe, zero‑copy cloning) in your résumé and be ready to walk through a recent architecture diagram showing how you leveraged these features to reduce latency + cost by ≥ 30 %; bring a one‑page “design brief” as a portfolio piece for the interview.
• Build a small AI‑enhanced data pipeline on Snowflake (e.g., using Snowpark Python + native vector search) and publish the notebook on GitHub; reference this project in your cover letter and mention the specific Snowflake‑AI capabilities you experimented with, proving you treat AI as a collaborative tool.
• Prepare STAR stories that demonstrate low‑ego, experimental mindset: e.g., a time you rolled out a “fail fast” proof‑of‑concept for a new data mesh or external table integration, measured results, iterated, and scaled it across teams—all while coordinating remotely across EU time zones.
• Showcase remote‑first collaboration skills: include metrics on cross‑functional projects you led using Slack, Teams, and Asana (or similar), and be ready to discuss how you maintain code review quality and data governance standards when team members are distributed.
• In salary negotiations, reference Snowflake’s German market benchmarks for senior architects (≈ €130–150k base + targeted RSU grants) and tie your compensation ask to the quantifiable business impact you delivered in prior roles (e.g., “saved €2 M annually by redesigning data ingestion”).