Snowflake Developer: Role, Responsibilities, Skills, Salary and More

With data growing by leaps and bounds, organizations are garnering the best of data-related solutions and technologies that can help them with data storage, management, and Big Data. Adopting a cloud-driven approach is almost inevitable. Snowflake is one such SaaS-based platform that powers the data cloud and offers an intelligent infrastructure, optimized storage, and an elastic performance engine.

Snowflake has been driving multiple organizations spread against diverse industry domains, towards smart products, approaches, and services. It is a data warehouse platform that is created on top of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud to offer flexible and scalable solutions. It is considered one of the best cloud data warehouse solutions with robust support for languages like .NET, Python, Golang, Java, etc.

There are salient features of Snowflake which are instrumental in making it a much-wanted technology, here are some of the major ones:

• Hybrid tables, External tables, Iceberg tables
• SQL API, Snowpark API
• Continuous data pipelines and protection
• Native app framework
• External functions
• Connectors and Drivers
• Supported cloud regions and platforms
• Nearly zero administration
• Cloud agnostic solution
• Concurrency and workload isolation

There has been a great demand for Snowflake developers, the world over and the reasons are quite simple. Thanks to the salient features that Snowflake offers and its increasing popularity quotient, a Snowflake developer is considered a great asset for organizations today.

Snowflake Developer: An Overview

A Snowflake developer is a software programmer who is trained well to deliver fast and consistent performance regardless of scale. These resources are efficient enough in building applications that are auto-scalable and can be implemented worldwide, trustworthy data pipelines in chosen language with the least infrastructure management, and fasten ML workflows with quick data access and processing for SQL and Python.

There are Snowflake data engineers who go a step ahead and create algorithms to analyze raw data and extract patterns and trends in those data sets. They need detailed expertise in SQL databases and many programming languages.

Snowflake developers can create data-intensive apps with flexible performance, scalability, and concurrency parameters. There is horizontal and vertical scalability with faster response time, whatever the load may be. This is because of its multi-cluster and shared data architecture.

Snowflake Developer Skills

The Snowflake developer skill set comprises the following skills, bifurcated into technical skills and soft skills:

Technical Skills:

• Knowledge of SQL language and cloud-based technologies
• Data warehousing concepts, data modeling, metadata management
• Data lakes, multi-dimensional models, data dictionaries
• Migration to AWS or Azure Snowflake platform
• Performance tuning and setting up resource monitors
• Snowflake modeling – roles, databases, schemas
• SQL performance measuring, query tuning, and database tuning
• ETL tools with cloud-driven skills
• Integration with third-party tools
• Ability to build analytical solutions and models
• Coding in languages like Python, Java, JavaScript
• Root cause analysis of models with solutions
• Hadoop, Spark, and other warehousing tools
• Managing sets of XML, JSON, and CSV from disparate sources
• SQL-based databases like Oracle SQL Server, Teradata, etc.
• Snowflake warehousing, architecture, processing, administration
• Data ingestion into Snowflake
• Enterprise-level technical exposure to Snowflake applications

Soft Skills:

• Project management
• Problem-solving
• Innovation and best coding practices
• Interpersonal, presentation, and communication skills
• Critical and out-of-the-box thinking
• Analytical, quantitative, problem-solving, and organizational skills
• Testing and test case preparation abilities

Snowflake Developer Roles and Responsibilities

Seeing the significance that they tag along; the Snowflake developer roles and responsibilities must encompass the following set of activities:

• Create, test, and implement enterprise-level apps with Snowflake
• Design and implement features for identity and access management
• Create authorization frameworks for better access control
• Implement novel query optimization, major security competencies with encryption
• Solve performance issues and scalability issues in the system
• Transaction management with distributed data processing algorithms
• Possess ownership right from start to finish
• Build, monitor, and optimize ETL and ELT processes with data models
• Migrate solutions from on-premises setup to cloud-based platforms
• Understand and implement the latest delivery approaches based on data architecture
• Project documentation and tracking based on understanding user requirements
• Perform data integration with third-party tools including architecting, designing, coding, and testing phases
• Manage documentation of data models, architecture, and maintenance processes
• Continually review and audit data models for enhancement
• Maintenance of ideal data pipeline based on ETL tools
• Coordination with BI experts and analysts for customized data models and integration
• Code updates, new code development, and reverse engineering
• Performance tuning, user acceptance training, application support
• Maintain confidentiality of data
• Risk assessment, management, and mitigation plans
• Regular engagement with teams for status reporting and routine activities
• Migration activities from one database to another or on-premises to cloud

Snowflake Developer Salary Details

Based on different geographies, the Snowflake developer salary varies. Here is a glimpse of their salaries in different regions:

The national average salary for a Snowflake Developer is £41,765 in the United Kingdom

The national average salary for a Snowflake Developer is $103,623 in the United States.

The national average salary for a Snowflake Developer is $76,624 in Canada.

Snowflake Developer salary in India ranges between ₹ 4.5 Lakhs to ₹ 11.9 Lakhs with an average annual salary of ₹ 6.5 Lakhs.

Snowflake Interview Questions

Snowflake is a modern-day technology and Snowflake interview questions that can be faced by developers could be tricky. Here are some important ones that can help:

• What are the features of Snowflake?
• What is the schema in Snowflake?
• What kind of SQL does Snowflake use?
• What ETL tools do you use with Snowflake?
• What type of database is Snowflake?
• What is Snowflake Time Travel?
• What is SnowPipe?
• Is Snowflake OLTP or OLAP?
• How to create a Snowflake task?
• What is a Snowflake cloud data warehouse?
• Explain Snowflake architecture
• Describe Snowflake computing.
• What are the cloud platforms currently supported by Snowflake?
• Is Snowflake an ETL tool?
• Is Snowflake PaaS or SaaS?
• How important is the storage layer to Snowflake?
• Explain the functions of the compute layer in Snowflake
• Explain Snowflake caching
• What do you know about zero-copy in Snowflake?
• Explain the query processing layer in Snowflake
• How is metadata stored in Snowflake?
• Explain the cloud services layer in Snowflake architecture
• How many nodes does a large Snowflake warehouse have?
• Can Snowflake be called a data lake?
• Explain a Snowflake cluster
• Can Snowflake support unstructured data?
• What type of tool is Snowflake?
• Briefly explain the different data security features that are available in Snowflake.
• Can you give a brief explanation about Snowflake AWS?
• List of the different types of caching in Snowflake

Good Read: Snowflake vs Redshift: Revolutionizing Cloud-based Data Warehousing

Snowflake Developer: The Wrap Up

Snowflake is a highly popular and user-friendly technology for effective, fast, and flexible data storage, processing, and analytical solutions.

No wonder, why, Snowflake developers are much in demand and the world is looking for the finest of Snowflake resources. The above-mentioned details showcase the expertise and responsibility that is looked for, in any Snowflake developer.

Roles, responsibilities, skills, and salary may vary based on the level of experience and expertise the resources have. With the increase in the experience level, the parameters may be more intense and rewarding.

Even different geographies may have a varied set of parameters to judge and recruit a Snowflake developer. Whichever way it is, building a career in Snowflake development is surely fruitful!