Snowflake has quickly emerged as a powerhouse for tools companies can use to manage their ever-growing stores of data. To remain near the front of the pack, it needs to hire the best talent — especially as it tries to catch rivals like Databricks.
To determine what that talent looks like, Insider reviewed hundreds of job openings currently posted for Snowflake’s various teams including engineering, sales, marketing, finance, IT, and customer support. Most of the jobs pay over $100,000, and many director-level salaries hover around $250,000.
The technical openings span traditional engineering roles to solutions architects — common “fixer” jobs in cloud computing that get customers up and running on Snowflake. These jobs require a long list of skills, including the Go programming language and the Spark analytics software, many of which are covered in certification courses.
Per state law, job postings that may attract candidates in Colorado (including remote openings) are required to provide a compensation band. We included that band as an indicator, according to experience level and based on the job postings, though it may vary from state to state. We also included crowdsourced salaries from Glassdoor. Snowflake declined to comment for this story.
Director-level salary: $176,600 to $250,750
Senior-level salary: $132,300 to $176,000
Most role openings mention Java. After Java, the next most in-demand languages are Python and C++, with roughly 40% of job openings looking for familiarity with both.
In addition, engineers are expected to have familiarity with the key cloud platforms: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Forty percent of postings require familiarity with AWS and Azure, while about 30% require familiarity with Google Cloud.
Beyond those key skills, there’s a wide range of specializations Snowflake needs to build its products, though they appear in a small number of postings: Terraform, FoundationDB, Cassandra, Ansible, Spark, Git, Hadoop, React, JavaScript, and Golang.
Around half of all job postings are looking for computer science graduates. Thirty-two percent of job postings request Ph.D.-level experience, while 12% are looking for master’s degrees (though there’s overlap — several job postings ask for a master’s or Ph.D.).
Java is Snowflake’s bread and butter for its platform, so the best place to start is getting a Java certification like the one Oracle offers. But you can also learn how to use Java through online courses like Udemy. You’ll probably want to tack on a strong understanding of algorithmic structures. You can get a general introduction to algorithms and data structures with Harvard’s popular CS50x online course, though you will want to explore more advanced topics.
To get familiar with cloud platforms, a good starting place is to obtain the solutions architect certifications for the major cloud providers. AWS’s associate-level solutions architect certification and Microsoft Azure’s solutions architect certification will give a general overview of the concepts behind those tools.
Solutions architect: $111,800 to $148,750.
Senior solutions architect: $126,900 to $203,000
Snowflake’s professional-services team is responsible for making sure Snowflake’s customers can get the product working in the first place.
More than 80% of job postings indicated a need for familiarity with business intelligence. Business-intelligence tools like Looker and Tableau help companies automatically parse and interpret their data and are a cornerstone of company decision-making.
More than half the postings also require experience in building high-quality pipelines (typically referred to as ETL, or “extract transform load”), which make sure a company’s data is accessible and legible.
In addition, solutions architects and other professional-services providers need to be equipped with a wide variety of skills to tackle any problems customers might have. Each of these skills was mentioned in roughly half the job postings for professional services.
Infrastructure experience: Hadoop, HBase, MapReduce, Greenplum
Cloud: AWS (S3 and Kinesis, in particular), Oracle Exadata, Tableau
Programming languages: SQL, Java, C, C++, Ruby, Perl, Bash
Snowflake has its own certificate, so start there. But other certifications will cover most of the bases: the Amazon solutions architect associate program, the Google Cloud professional architect certification, and the Azure solutions architect certification.
Technical Support Manager: $111,800 to $148,750
Senior Support Account Manager: $105,500 to $140,250
Senior Cloud Support Engineer: $119,500 to $159,000
Director, Technical Support: $172,500 to $245,000
Snowflake currently has around 50 customer support openings, ranging from support engineers to account managers.
Cloud support engineers debug technical issues with a customer’s products, which can include fixing SQL queries. Some listings also request additional languages, like .NET and Python, as “nice-to-haves.”
Account managers are expected to have more general technical knowledge of data warehousing products, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Each of those clouds offers a certification that doesn’t dig too far into the weeds, such as AWS’s certified cloud practitioner course.
Account Executive: $126,000 to $157,500 (though the company says it is common to receive $252,000-$315,000 with participation in the commission plan)
Sales Engineer: $138,700 to $183,750 (up to $184,900 to $245,000 with commission plan)
Snowflake currently has 300 sales openings, ranging from sales development representatives to account executives.
Sales listings seek a deep understanding of the product, such as how to use ETL pipelines — a tool for cleaning up data prior to storing it in a warehouse. Coursera has a course called Big Data Integration and Processing that covers that. Some listings also request experience in Salesforce and customer-relationship-management software.
Several openings list more advanced technical skills as “nice to haves.” Those generally include SQL and Tableau, as well as languages like Python and Java. Having expertise in those skills could provide an edge when interviewing. Tableau offers a Tableau Desktop Specialist certification, while Coursera offers an introductory course in SQL.
Director: $154,000 to $168,000
Marketing Manager: $123,709
Growth Marketing Manager: $110,000 to $119,000
Snowflake has dozens of roles open for marketing experts, ranging from account-based marketing to digital marketing managers.
Employees on the marketing team need to understand marketing tools like Marketo, 6sense, Salesforce, and others. Some roles also expect experience with ad-experimentation techniques. This includes knowing how to interpret the results of A/B tests, a common strategy where companies compare the results of two different ads for the same product and pick the one that performs best.
There are a wide variety of courses across education platforms like EdX, Coursera, and others. You can see a full list of some of the best marketing courses on Insider.
Udemy offers a course on A/B testing that covers general experiment-design skills and how to interpret results of tests.
Snowflake is also hiring data scientists on the marketing team. You can cover some of the general data-science basics with a course like DataCamp, which also offers a certification.
Buyer: $101,200 to 130,000
Director of Market Development: $183,100 to $260,000
Snowflake has several dozen openings for its finance and accounting teams. Finance roles in general are expected to have a basic level of proficiency in data transformation, such as using Excel to aggregate data with pivot tables. Udemy offers a crash course in using Excel for financial analysis.
Business intelligence analysts are responsible for the data that ends up in front of a leadership team. They’re expected to have experience with SQL and dashboarding tools like Tableau. Snowflake also lists Python as a nice-to-have skill.
The rest of Snowflake’s finance team is filled with other roles like corporate development, treasury, and analysts on more specific subjects like travel and expense. It’s also hiring buyers who are responsible for procurement and managing vendor relationships.
Senior Salesforce Developer/Admin: $130,800 to $174,000
Senior Penetration Tester: $165,400 to $220,000
Snowflake is hiring several dozen roles in IT that range from data engineering to security and Salesforce deployment.
Salesforce developers are responsible for building out the tools used by employees on teams like sales to manage customer information. They create the entire system — from which fields employees are filling out to how they build sales reports. Salesforce offers a variety of certifications for Salesforce developers
Data engineers are responsible for ensuring any and all data the company uses is accessible in the first place.
Data engineers are expected to have expert-level skills in SQL and other languages like Python. Google offers a professional data-engineering certification, which covers best practices. IBM also offers a solutions architect certificate that covers data warehouses.
Snowflake is also looking for security experts for a variety of roles like penetration testing and red team engineers who handle emergencies. The company is looking for certifications like the Offensive Security Certified Professional or the Global Information Assurance Certification Penetration Tester.
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