Job Description

Senior Snowflake Engineer

Our 'black belt' specialists are leaders in their domains: digital champions, delivery-focused experts, top-tier security professionals, AI thought leaders, and engineering best practice advocates.

With a global footprint and deep local insight, Software at Scale delivers cutting-edge technology solutions that power mission-critical platforms. We solve complex engineering challenges at scale, driving quality, performance, and resilience through the strength of our people.

Empower Your Career

We're seeking a highly experienced Senior Snowflake Engineer to play a key role in designing, building, and optimising modern, enterprise-grade data platforms across our most important programmes.

This role requires deep, hands-on commercial experience with Snowflake and a comprehensive understanding of its capabilities. We're looking for someone who goes beyond writing SQL and building pipelines, with the ability to leverage the broader Snowflake ecosystem to architect scalable solutions, optimise performance, manage costs, and implement robust security and governance practices.

This is a hands-on, technically influential role. You'll take ownership of complex engineering challenges, influence architectural decisions, identify opportunities to maximise the Snowflake platform, and drive engineering best practices across the wider team.

Please note: Extensive commercial experience with Snowflake is an absolute must-have. We're looking for a genuine Snowflake specialist, not someone who has simply used it as one of several data technologies.

Key Responsibilities

• Snowflake Engineering & Architecture: Design, build, and maintain scalable Snowflake data platforms, developing robust data structures, ingestion frameworks, transformation pipelines, and data models.
• Advanced Snowflake Capabilities: Leverage the broader Snowflake ecosystem, including Snowpipe, Streams, Tasks, Dynamic Tables, Snowpark, Stored Procedures, UDFs, and Snowflake Scripting to deliver sophisticated data engineering solutions.
• Performance & Cost Optimisation: Take ownership of Snowflake performance tuning, query optimisation, warehouse management, workload scaling, resource monitoring, and credit consumption to maximise performance and cost efficiency.
• Security & Governance: Implement enterprise-grade security and governance practices, including RBAC, masking policies, row access policies, secure data sharing, auditing, and data protection.
• Data Integration & Transformation: Build reliable batch, incremental, and near-real-time data pipelines, leveraging advanced SQL, Python, and supporting technologies such as dbt and Airflow.
• Platform Reliability & Automation: Establish robust monitoring, data quality, error handling, CI/CD, and deployment practices to ensure reliable production environments.
• Technical Leadership: Influence technical architecture, solve complex engineering challenges, mentor other engineers, and champion engineering best practices across the team.

What You Bring

• Snowflake Expertise (Essential): Extensive commercial experience designing, developing, and supporting enterprise Snowflake environments in production. You have deep knowledge of the platform's architecture, features, capabilities, and best practices.
• Broad Snowflake Knowledge: Strong hands-on experience across Snowflake's core and advanced capabilities, including virtual warehouses, Snowpipe, Streams, Tasks, Dynamic Tables, Snowpark, Stored Procedures, UDFs, Time Travel, zero-copy cloning, and secure data sharing.
• Advanced SQL & Python: Expert-level SQL skills, including complex transformations, query optimisation, and analytical processing. Strong Python experience for automation and data engineering.
• Performance & Cost Engineering: Proven ability to diagnose performance bottlenecks, optimise workloads, manage warehouse utilisation, and reduce Snowflake compute costs.
• Data Architecture: Strong understanding of modern data warehousing, dimensional modelling, Medallion architecture, data integration, and enterprise data engineering patterns.
• Security & Governance: Experience implementing enterprise data security, access controls, data governance, and compliance practices.
• Engineering Best Practices: Experience with Git, CI/CD, automated testing, infrastructure as code, and production deployment practices.
• Senior Engineering Mindset: A proactive problem solver who takes ownership, challenges conventional approaches, influences technical decisions, and communicates effectively with technical and business stakeholders.

Bonus: SnowPro certifications, experience with dbt, Airflow, Terraform, AWS/Azure/GCP, Snowflake Cortex, or financial services and other regulated environments.

What We Offer

• Meaningful, hands-on engineering work across complex, enterprise-grade data platforms.
• The opportunity to work with Snowflake at scale and leverage its advanced capabilities.
• Clear growth pathways from Senior to Staff and beyond.
• A low-ceremony, delivery-focused environment that values engineers who proactively own outcomes.
• Competitive remuneration and benefits.
• The opportunity to work alongside highly experienced engineers on challenging, high-impact systems.