Senior Snowflake Platform Architect

We are seeking a Senior Snowflake Platform Architect to join our EA Data Integrations and EDW Platform Team at Intuitive Surgical. This senior technical lead role owns the architectural vision, operational excellence, and security posture of our enterprise Snowflake platform — supporting terabyte-scale workloads.
Key Responsibilities
1. Architecture, Performance & Scale
Own the Snowflake platform architecture — account topology, database/schema design, warehouse strategy, replication, disaster recovery, and multi-environment governance
Maintain 99.9%+ availability through proactive monitoring, resource monitors, defined SLOs/error budgets, and incident response
Optimize performance and cost at scale — clustering keys, search optimization and query acceleration service, multi-cluster warehouse scaling, workload isolation, materialized views/dynamic tables, and result/query caching
Apply zero-copy cloning, Time Travel, and cross-region/cross-cloud replication for DR, dev/test provisioning, and business continuity at terabyte-scale
Design Snowflake Task graphs and evaluate new capabilities (dynamic tables, Iceberg tables, SPCS, Cortex AI) for production readiness
2. Security, Network, Governance & Compliance
Design the RBAC architecture — role hierarchies, least-privilege patterns, tag-based governance, masking policies, and row-level security at scale
Architect Okta SSO (SAML 2.0/SCIM) and OAuth 2.0 — federation, MFA enforcement, authentication and session policies
Design network topology and network policies for secure integrations — PrivateLink/Private Service Connect, VPC/VNet peering, IP allowlisting, and traffic segmentation across hybrid and multi-cloud environments; apply zero-trust patterns when connecting partner networks, on-prem systems, and cross-account services to Snowflake
Run ongoing network policy operations — login IP auditing by user/geography, gap remediation for offshore and international users, and iterative policy tuning against real traffic patterns
Operationalize Snowflake Trust Center — security scanners, CIS benchmarks, and detection patterns (login anomalies, privilege escalation, exfiltration indicators)
Enforce data classification and protection — PII/PHI handling, encryption, tokenization, retention/purge automation, and SOX/HITRUST compliance
Govern service account security and change management workflows across the platform
Integrate enterprise data catalog and lineage tooling (Collibra, Alation, or Atlan) for metadata harvesting and column-level lineage
Govern the Cortex AI platform — RBAC and least-privilege scoping for Cortex Agents/Search/Analyst, AI observability and quality monitoring (agent health, latency, error rate), guardrails against data leakage and prompt injection, and audit trails for agent/tool activity
Design and operate the agent observability and evaluation program — tracing, golden-dataset evaluation, LLM-judge scoring, and drift detection to ensure production agent quality
Manage the MCP Server lifecycle — tool-level access scoping, OAuth security integrations for external AI clients, and per-domain grant governance
Govern Cortex Code (AI coding assistant) usage — account/user-level credit limit policy, tiered access enforcement, and consumption monitoring across CLI/Desktop/Snowsight surfaces
Architect the AI environment SDLC — sandbox-to-production promotion model (dev/QA/prod), schema-level RBAC per environment, TTL-based data governance, and business-to-platform-team handoff process
3. SQL, Python & Platform Automation
Write expert-level analytical SQL against Account Usage views for dashboards, cost attribution, and incident root-cause analysis
Build Python-based admin tooling — automated provisioning, role audits, compliance evidence generation, and anomaly detection
Orchestrate workflows using Apache Airflow, Snowflake Tasks/Streams, and dbt for event-driven and incremental processing
Build CI/CD pipelines for schema and object changes using Terraform, schemachange/Liquibase, and Git-based workflows
Automate cost governance — budgets, resource monitors, tagging, and chargeback/showback dashboards
4. Applications, Containers & AI Infrastructure
Govern Streamlit-in-Snowflake and Snowflake App Runtime (Next.js/React) — deployment standards, RBAC, and environment promotion
Manage Snowpark Container Services (SPCS) — compute pools, image registry, GPU provisioning, and egress controls
Architect the Cortex AI platform — search services, Cortex Agents, semantic views, AI guardrails, and AI cost monitoring
Enable ML feature engineering at scale via Snowpark, and provide architectural guidance on RAG patterns and emerging Cortex features
5. Platform Analytics
Architect a semantic/metrics layer (Cortex Analyst, semantic views) for consistent business definitions across all BI tools
Integrate and govern Tableau with workload isolation and elastic scale-out to hold latency targets under high concurrency
Design analytics-optimized data marts and medallion (bronze/silver/gold) patterns for governed, self-service reporting
Architect near-real-time and time-series/IoT analytics pipelines using Snowpipe Streaming and dynamic tables
Define contract-first data products — schema versioning and reliability SLAs — for BI, analytics, and ML consumers
Establish analytics data quality and observability — dbt tests, freshness SLAs, and anomaly detection on key metrics
6. Snowflake Postgres
Provision and manage Snowflake Postgres instances — sizing, security (SSL, key-pair auth, credential rotation), and network policy assignment
Configure pg_lake/Iceberg integration for cross-engine querying and hybrid Postgres/Snowflake workload patterns
Monitor Postgres health — cache hits, connections, locks, and replication
7. Migration & Modernization
Lead legacy platform migrations (Teradata, Oracle, SQL Server) to Snowflake — schema conversion, validation, and cutover planning
Evaluate CDC/ELT connector strategy (Fivetran, HVR, Debezium) and establish enterprise data modeling standards
8. Platform CoE, Technical Leadership & Vendor Management
Lead the Snowflake Platform CoE — best practices, reference architectures, reusable templates, and a platform knowledge base (ADRs, onboarding guides)
Drive platform adoption — architecture reviews, guardrails, enablement sessions, and consultative support for teams building on Snowflake
Track platform health KPIs — adoption, cost efficiency, security posture, and query performance baselines
Serve as the senior technical escalation point and mentor team members
Own the primary Snowflake vendor relationship — commercial terms, capacity commitments, support escalations, and roadmap/EA program participation
Lead vendor evaluation and selection for adjacent platform tooling (catalog/lineage, CDC/ELT, observability) — RFP support, POC design, and total-cost-of-ownership analysis
Manage ongoing vendor performance — SLA tracking, issue escalation, and renewal/negotiation cycles in partnership with procurement
Serve as technical point of contact for Snowflake Professional Services or partner-led engagements (migrations, architecture reviews)
Required Qualifications
8+ years in data platform engineering or infrastructure architecture; 5+ Snowflake with 2+ in an architect/lead role
Expert SQL — CTEs, window functions, VARIANT/ARRAY, QUALIFY, LATERAL FLATTEN, MERGE, and query profile diagnosis
5+ years Python — Snowflake connector/Snowpark, pandas, and scheduled automation (Airflow/Tasks)
Terraform, Git-based CI/CD, and AWS/GCP (storage integrations, IAM, KMS, PrivateLink)
Hands-on Okta/SAML SSO, OAuth 2.0, and network security architecture — VPC/VNet design, PrivateLink, and segmentation for enterprise integrations
Regulated industry experience (healthcare, medical device) with SOX/HITRUST/HIPAA compliance
Dimensional modeling (star/snowflake schema, SCDs) and TB-scale performance optimization
AI/ML platform infrastructure experience or governed self-service AI environments
Experience managing vendor relationships and contract/renewal cycles for enterprise data platform tooling
Preferred Qualifications
SnowPro Architect certification (strongly preferred), Administrator, or Core
Snowflake Postgres, pg_lake/Iceberg integration, catalog-linked databases
dbt, Streamlit, React/Next.js (App Runtime), Kubernetes (SPCS)
Streaming technologies (Kafka, Kinesis, Snowpipe Streaming)
Cortex AI — AI functions, Cortex Search, Cortex Agents, Document AI, LLM/RAG architecture
Cortex AI governance — AI observability/monitoring, agent RBAC design, data protection for RAG/search pipelines
Data catalog/lineage tools (Collibra, Alation, Atlan) and observability platforms (Datadog, Prometheus/Grafana, Splunk)
Essential Requirements
Bachelor's in Computer Science or equivalent; Master's a plus
Strong systems-thinking, architectural design, and communication skills
Security-first mindset with deep understanding of SAML, OAuth 2.0, SCIM, network security, and data protection
Comfortable at the intersection of hands-on technical work and strategic platform decisions

Employment type
Full-time

Work arrangement
No