Snowflake DBA

Role Summary

We are looking for a technically strong Snowflake Database Administrator to own end-to-end administration, performance engineering, security governance, and cost optimization of our Snowflake cloud data platform. This role requires deep hands-on expertise across account/object administration, RBAC and security architecture, warehouse and query performance tuning, Python-based automation, and Snowflake's native AI stack (Cortex AI, Streamlit-in-Snowflake). The candidate will act as the platform SME, partnering with data engineering, BI, security, and application teams to keep the platform performant, secure, cost-efficient, and audit ready.

Key Responsibilities

Platform Administration & Operations

• Administer Snowflake accounts, databases, schemas, warehouses, resource monitors, and integrations across DEV/QA/UAT/PROD environments.
• Manage account-level and object-level parameters, network policies, and multi-region / multi-account topology.
• Configure and maintain storage integrations, external stages, external tables, and Snowpipe / Snowpipe Streaming for continuous data ingestion.
• Manage Time Travel, Fail-safe, zero-copy cloning, and data retention policies; validate and troubleshoot storage vs. Fail-safe billing anomalies.

Security, RBAC & Governance

• Design and maintain a hierarchical RBAC model (functional roles → technical roles → system roles) aligned to least-privilege principles.
• Own object ownership, grants management, future grants, and role inheritance across databases, schemas, and warehouses.
• Configure authentication mechanisms — SSO/SAML, RSA key-pair, MFA — and manage service account lifecycle and key rotation.
• Implement data governance controls: row access policies, column-level masking policies, tags/tag-based masking, and object tagging for classification.
• Maintain audit readiness via ACCESS_HISTORY, QUERY_HISTORY, LOGIN_HISTORY, and GRANTS_TO_ROLES monitoring, and support SOX/compliance audits.

Performance Engineering & Cost Optimization

• Tune virtual warehouse sizing, multi-cluster scaling policies, and auto-suspend/resume settings to balance performance vs. spend.
• Analyze and optimize query performance using QUERY_PROFILE, clustering keys, search optimization service, and materialized views.
• Monitor credit consumption via ACCOUNT_USAGE / ORGANIZATION_USAGE views; build automated cost/usage dashboards and threshold-based alerting.
• Diagnose storage anomalies (active vs. billed storage gaps, stuck Fail-safe, table clone bloat) and drive resolution with Snowflake support.
• Own hybrid table, Snowpark-optimized warehouse, and serverless feature (Snowpipe, tasks, dynamic tables) cost/performance trade-off decisions.

Automation, AI & Application Enablement

• Build and maintain Python-based automation for RBAC provisioning, environment setup, health checks, and operational runbooks (mandatory).
• Develop and maintain stored procedures / tasks for scheduled monitoring, alerting (e.g., cost or usage threshold alerts), and self-healing operations.
• Implement and support Snowflake Cortex AI capabilities — Cortex Analyst, Cortex Search, Cortex Functions (COMPLETE, SUMMARIZE, SENTIMENT, TRANSLATE) — for GenAI-driven use cases (mandatory).
• Design, deploy, and maintain Streamlit-in-Snowflake applications for internal tooling, dashboards, and self-service data/AI access (mandatory).
• Manage Cortex AI cost governance: token/spend monitoring by user/service account, tiered alerting, and chargeback reporting.

Collaboration, CI/CD & Documentation

• Support CI/CD pipelines for Snowflake object deployment (schema change scripts, version control, release gating).
• Partner with data engineering teams to troubleshoot ETL/ELT pipeline failures, connectivity issues, and data load errors.
• Maintain naming conventions, architecture diagrams, runbooks, and platform documentation for onboarding and knowledge transfer.
• Provide L2/L3 support for production incidents, perform root-cause analysis, and drive permanent fixes.

Required Technical Skills

Snowflake Core

Account/object administration, virtual warehouses, micro-partitions & clustering, caching layers, Time Travel, Fail-safe, zero-copy cloning, resource monitors, hybrid tables, dynamic tables.

RBAC & Security

Role hierarchy design, grants/future grants, network policies, SSO/SAML, RSA key-pair auth, MFA, masking & row-access policies, object tagging.

Performance Tuning

Query profiling, clustering key strategy, search optimization service, materialized views, warehouse sizing & multi-cluster scaling.

Cost Governance

ACCOUNT_USAGE / ORGANIZATION_USAGE analysis, credit consumption monitoring, storage vs. Fail-safe reconciliation, budget/threshold alerting.

Python (Mandatory)

Automation scripting, Snowflake Python Connector / Snowpark for Python, REST/CLI tooling, building internal utilities and monitoring scripts.

SQL

Advanced SQL for tuning, stored procedures (SQL/JavaScript/Python), CTEs, window functions, query optimization and rewrites.

Cortex AI (Mandatory)

Cortex Analyst, Cortex Search, Cortex Functions (COMPLETE, SUMMARIZE, SENTIMENT, TRANSLATE, EXTRACT_ANSWER), embedding/vector functions, AI cost/token monitoring.

Streamlit in Snowflake (Mandatory)

Building, deploying, and maintaining Streamlit-in-Snowflake apps for dashboards, admin tooling, and self-service data/AI access.

Data Loading & Connectivity

COPY INTO, Snowpipe / Snowpipe Streaming, external stages/tables, JDBC/ODBC/Python connector configuration and version management.

Cloud Platform

Working knowledge of underlying cloud infrastructure (AWS/Azure/GCP) — storage, networking, IAM as it relates to Snowflake.