Experience: 7+ years in database/data platform administration, including 3+ years of hands-on Snowflake administration
Position Summary
Client is seeking an experienced Snowflake Administrator to manage, support, secure, and optimize its enterprise Snowflake data platform. The ideal candidate will have strong hands-on experience administering Snowflake environments, managing security and access controls, monitoring performance and consumption, troubleshooting production issues, and supporting enterprise data engineering and analytics teams.
The Snowflake Administrator will work closely with Data Engineering, Analytics, Cloud Infrastructure, Security, and Application teams to ensure the Snowflake platform is highly available, secure, scalable, cost-effective, and compliant with enterprise and healthcare data-security requirements.
Key Responsibilities
- Administer and support enterprise Snowflake environments, including development, test, QA, and production.
- Manage Snowflake accounts, databases, schemas, warehouses, users, roles, and privileges.
- Design and maintain Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) following least-privilege principles.
- Configure and support authentication and security integrations, including SSO, MFA, OAuth, and SCIM where applicable.
- Monitor Snowflake performance, workloads, query execution, storage utilization, warehouse utilization, and credit consumption.
- Perform query and warehouse performance tuning and work with development teams to optimize inefficient workloads.
- Optimize Snowflake costs through warehouse sizing, auto-suspend/auto-resume, workload isolation, resource monitors, and consumption analysis.
- Configure and maintain resource monitors, alerts, auditing, and operational monitoring.
- Troubleshoot production issues involving failed queries, performance degradation, data-loading failures, connectivity, permissions, and integrations.
- Support Snowflake features such as Time Travel, Zero-Copy Cloning, Secure Data Sharing, Streams, Tasks, Snowpipe, Dynamic Tables, and Fail-safe as applicable.
- Develop and maintain backup, recovery, business continuity, and disaster-recovery procedures.
- Support data ingestion and integration from cloud and enterprise platforms using technologies such as AWS/Azure, ETL/ELT tools, APIs, and data pipelines.
- Work with Data Engineers and Architects to establish Snowflake standards, naming conventions, security policies, and platform best practices.
- Automate repetitive administrative activities using SQL, Python, SnowSQL, Terraform, scripting, or CI/CD pipelines.
- Participate in platform upgrades, migrations, releases, and environment-management activities.
- Maintain technical documentation, operational runbooks, architecture diagrams, access-control documentation, and support procedures.
- Participate in production support, incident resolution, root-cause analysis, and on-call support as required.
Required Qualifications
- 7+ years of experience in database administration, cloud data platforms, data engineering, or related areas.
- 3+ years of strong hands-on Snowflake administration experience in an enterprise production environment.
- Strong understanding of Snowflake architecture, including:
- Virtual Warehouses
- Databases and Schemas
- Micro-partitions and Clustering
- Query Processing and Caching
- Storage and Compute separation
- Snowflake security architecture
- Strong hands-on experience with RBAC, users, roles, grants, network policies, and security integrations.
- Experience monitoring and optimizing Snowflake performance and credit consumption.
- Strong SQL skills with the ability to diagnose and tune complex queries.
- Experience with Snowflake monitoring capabilities such as ACCOUNT_USAGE, INFORMATION_SCHEMA, Query History, Warehouse Metering, Access History, and Resource Monitors.
- Experience supporting enterprise ETL/ELT and data-integration processes.
- Experience working with at least one major cloud platform, preferably Microsoft Azure or AWS.
- Experience with scripting and automation using Python, PowerShell, Bash, Terraform, or similar technologies.
- Understanding of CI/CD and DevOps practices for database and data-platform deployments.
- Strong troubleshooting, analytical, documentation, and communication skills.
Preferred Qualifications
- SnowPro Core or SnowPro Advanced: Administrator certification.
- Experience administering Snowflake in a large healthcare, financial services, insurance, or other highly regulated enterprise environment.
- Experience with healthcare data and security requirements, including HIPAA and PHI protection.
- Experience implementing data masking, row access policies, tagging, classification, and governance controls in Snowflake.
- Experience with tools such as Informatica, Matillion, dbt, Fivetran, Azure Data Factory, Airflow, or similar platforms.
- Experience integrating Snowflake with BI/reporting platforms such as Power BI or Tableau.
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code, particularly Terraform.
- Familiarity with monitoring platforms such as Splunk, Datadog, Azure Monitor, or similar tools.
