Principal System Engineer

The Position

At Boehringer Ingelheim, data is a strategic asset that helps accelerate innovation and improve outcomes for patients around the world. Our global Data Platforms team provides the foundation that enables thousands of users, applications, and analytics solutions to access trusted and scalable data products.

As a Snowflake Platform Engineer, you will play a key role in operating, securing, and evolving one of the company's largest enterprise data platforms. Working with modern cloud technologies such as Snowflake and AWS, you will help deliver a reliable, scalable, and automated data ecosystem that empowers business functions and IT teams globally. Beyond platform operations and engineering, you will serve as a Snowflake subject matter expert, helping teams adopt best practices, solve complex challenges, and maximize the value of the platform.

This is an opportunity to combine deep Snowflake expertise with cloud engineering, automation, technical consulting, platform enablement, and modern software engineering practices while influencing the future direction of our data platform landscape.

Tasks and responsibilities

• Administer, operate, and continuously improve the enterprise Snowflake platform and its automations and integrated components, while helping engineering teams maximize platform adoption and value realization.
• Manage Snowflake security, roles, access controls, authentication, and governance controls.
• Monitor platform health, performance, availability, and cost efficiency.
• Support platform scalability, reliability, and operational excellence across global environments.
• Design and implement automation for platform provisioning, configuration, monitoring, and operational processes.
• Troubleshoot and resolve Snowflake platform incidents and performance issues.
• Collaborate with data engineering teams to optimize workloads, data pipelines, and data consumption patterns.
• Support CI/CD processes and Infrastructure-as-Code practices for platform deployment and management.
• Contribute to platform architecture and roadmap activities, and best-practice recommendations for Snowflake and AWS services.
• Implement and maintain platform observability, monitoring, alerting, and operational dashboards.
• Support event-driven and data integration patterns that enable scalable data movement.
• Create and maintain technical documentation, standards, and operational procedures.
• Contribute to continuous platform improvements, automation initiatives, and engineering best practices.

Requirements

Snowflake Expertise (Primary Requirement)

• Strong hands-on experience administering and operating Snowflake in enterprise environments.
• Deep understanding of Snowflake architecture, including:
• Virtual Warehouses;
• Storage & Compute Architecture;
• Resource Monitors;
• Security & RBAC;
• Data Sharing;
• Streams & Tasks;
• Snowpipe;
• Performance Optimization;
• Cost Management.
• Experience implementing Snowflake security and governance controls.
• Experience troubleshooting platform, security, and performance issues.
• Snowflake certification is highly desirable.

Cloud & Platform Engineering

• Strong knowledge of AWS cloud services and architecture.
• Experience with:
• IAM Roles and Policies;
• Lambda;
• SQS;
• EventBridge;
• API Gateway;
• ECS.
• Understanding of cloud security principles and platform operations.
• Experience integrating Snowflake with cloud-native services.

Software Engineering & Automation

• Strong Python, Java and SQL development skills.
• Experience building automation and operational tooling.
• Understanding of software engineering best practices:
• Version Control (Git);
• Code Reviews;
• Testing;
• Maintainable Design.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code and platform automation.
• Familiarity with event-driven and streaming architectures.

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Ownership mindset with a focus on operational excellence.
• Ability to collaborate effectively with globally distributed teams.
• Strong communication skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Continuous improvement mindset and passion for automation.
• Fluent English, written and spoken.