Senior / Staff Software Engineer — Platform

About Snorkel

Snorkel AI is the frontier AI data lab, helping teams build the data and environments behind high-performing frontier and agentic AI. We combine technology with research-driven AI data development to create datasets, benchmarks, evals, and custom solutions for real-world AI systems. Founded out of the Stanford AI Lab in 2019, Snorkel works with leading AI labs and enterprises to move from better data to better outcomes.

Excited to help us redefine how AI is built? Apply to be the newest Snorkeler!

About the Team

Snorkel's Platform organization owns the infrastructure and services that power everything at Snorkel — the pipelines, evals, access layers, event systems, governance, compute, and agent infrastructure that every product team and customer deployment depends on. We're a small team with a large surface area, and we're in the middle of a foundational architecture shift: moving from a single-database data path to a multi-source, event-driven agent first platform. The decisions being made now will define how our platform scales for years.

You will be making them.

About the Role

We're looking for Platform Engineers who combine strong infrastructure chops with real backend engineering depth. You'll build and operate the systems, services, and agent infrastructure that let product teams move fast and reliably — from data access layers and event-driven pipelines to the agent first architecture that will transform our ability to scale. Your work will directly allow us to scale the amount of high quality data we are able to deliver to our customers.

We are looking to grow our team of Platform Engineers, and are hiring at multiple levels.

What You'll Do

• Design and build agent infrastructure that allows us to safely and reliably speed up workflows from engineering and operation teams
• Design and implement event-driven data flows using event brokers, CDC connectors, schema registries, event routing, and dead letter queues — ensuring events flow reliably and failures are visible and recoverable
• Build the systems that track how data moves through the platform (lineage), enforce who can access what (governance and RBAC), and log what happened (auditing), including PII handling, retention policy enforcement, and audit infrastructure for enterprise and regulatory compliance
• Set strategy and architecture for build systems, testing frameworks, and CI/CD pipelines, and drive the transition toward robust, automated continuous deployment
• Instrument services with OpenTelemetry, define and monitor SLOs (query latency, pipeline success rates, service reliability), and build alerting that catches issues before they become incidents — you will be on-call for the systems you build
• Contribute to infrastructure cost visibility and optimization — query cost estimation, workload right-sizing, and routing data to the most cost-effective storage tier for its access pattern
• Collaborate with engineers, product managers, and designers to bring consistency and high standards to codebases, infrastructure, and processes

What You'll Bring

• 5+ years building platform infrastructure, backend services, or data systems in production — you have built and operated pipelines, data access layers, distributed services, or ETL/ELT systems at scale
• Strong proficiency in Python, and experience designing REST APIs for internal services and developers
• Strong background in distributed systems and cloud platforms (AWS preferred) — hands-on experience with services like S3, RDS, EKS, EventBridge, and IAM, and comfort working in a Terraform-managed environment
• Familiarity with data orchestration tools (Prefect, Airflow, or Dagster) and transformation frameworks (dbt)
• Understanding of data governance concepts — RBAC, PII handling, audit logging, data lineage
• Track record of leading complex engineering initiatives, influencing stakeholders, and delivering measurable impact
• Ability to work in a fast-paced environment with strong technical communication skills
• Fluency with modern developer tooling and a willingness to adopt new tools quickly — the team evaluates and integrates new tooling regularly to improve velocity and reliability
• Nice to Have
• Experience building shared libraries or SDKs consumed by multiple teams — versioning, backwards compatibility, migration support
• Experience with event-driven architectures — CDC, event buses, schema registries, at-least-once delivery semantics
• Experience with OpenTelemetry, ClickHouse, or similar observability infrastructure
• Prior work in regulated environments (SOC 2, FedRAMP, HIPAA) where compliance requirements shaped system design
• Experience with Ray or similar frameworks for distributed compute workloads
• Experience in hyper-growth startup environments or scaling engineering orgs
• Prior experience as a Tech Lead, Team Lead, or hands-on Engineering Manager
• Why This Role
• You'll have meaningful ownership over the infrastructure and services that every product team and customer deployment depends on. This isn't a maintenance role — you'll be making foundational architecture decisions that shape how the company scales, with a team that cares deeply about reliability, craft, and moving fast without breaking things.
• Snorkel is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer and is committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. Snorkel embraces diversity and provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment.
• Actual compensation will be determined based on factors including skills, qualifications, experience, and geographic location.