Snowflake Platform Engineer - 6 months Temp Contract in London

We are looking for an experienced Snowflake Platform Engineer to join our Data Platform team. In this role you will be responsible for the day-to-day operation, security, and evolution of our Snowflake data platform. You will ensure the platform remains secure, performant, and available to data consumers across the business, while partnering closely with data engineering, analytics, and security teams. This is a hands-on technical role that requires deep Snowflake expertise combined with a strong appreciation for governance, access control, and cloud infrastructure. You will act as the subject-matter expert for all things Snowflake and be a key point of contact for platform-related queries, incidents, and strategic decisions.

Enterprise Data Engineering sits within Global Technology. Our recent focus has been helping Schroders embed ESG data throughout our investment processes as part of the Global Sustainability initiative. While that work continues, we are expanding and centralising our engineering capabilities to support the entire organisation in 2025, with Snowflake increasingly at the centre of our data strategy.

What you’ll do

• Platform Administration & Operations
  • Own the day-to-day administration and health monitoring of the Snowflake environment, including warehouse management, query performance, and cost optimisation.
  • Monitor platform usage, proactively identify performance bottlenecks, and implement tuning measures (clustering keys, materialized views, resource monitors, etc.).
  • Manage Snowflake upgrades, feature releases, and preview evaluations, maintaining a release calendar and communicating changes to stakeholders.
  • Define and enforce platform standards, naming conventions, and best practices across databases, schemas, warehouses, and objects.
  • Maintain thorough documentation of platform architecture, runbooks, and operational procedures.
• Access Management & Identity
  • Design, implement, and maintain Snowflake RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) hierarchies aligned to the principle of least privilege.
  • Manage user provisioning and deprovisioning, including integration with SSO / identity providers (Okta, Azure AD, etc.).
  • Conduct regular access reviews and entitlement audits to ensure compliance with internal policies and external regulations.
  • Own service account management and key-pair authentication for pipeline and application integrations.
  • Collaborate with the security team to respond to access-related incidents and produce access reports for auditors.
• Security & Compliance
  • Implement and maintain Snowflake security controls including network policies, IP whitelisting, PrivateLink configurations, and multi-factor authentication enforcement.
  • Configure and manage dynamic data masking, row access policies, and column-level security to protect sensitive and PII data.
  • Ensure data encryption at rest and in transit is correctly configured and regularly validated.
  • Monitor Snowflake audit logs and the Account Usage schema for anomalous behaviour, integrating with SIEM tooling where required.
  • Support regulatory compliance initiatives (GDPR, SOC 2, ISO 27001) by providing platform-level evidence and implementing required controls.
  • Participate in security assessments, penetration tests, and remediation activities relevant to the Snowflake platform.
• Platform Upgrades & Change Management
  • Evaluate and plan the adoption of new Snowflake features and releases, assessing business impact and communicating rollout plans.
  • Manage infrastructure-as-code for Snowflake configuration using Terraform or equivalent tooling.
  • Coordinate change requests through the ITSM process, maintaining audit trails and rollback plans.
  • Lead post-incident reviews for platform outages or degradations, producing root-cause analyses and remediation actions.
• Collaboration & Stakeholder Engagement
  • Act as the primary escalation point for data engineering and analytics teams on platform issues, access requests, and architecture queries.
  • Work with data engineers to review pipelines, Snowpark workloads, and external table configurations for performance and security suitability.
  • Partner with Cloud/Infrastructure teams to manage Snowflake integrations with AWS or Azure services.
  • Provide guidance and mentoring to junior team members on Snowflake best practices and platform operations.

The knowledge, experience and qualifications you need

• Demonstrable experience of hands-on Snowflake administration in a production enterprise environment.
• Deep expertise in Snowflake RBAC, including role hierarchies, object-level privileges, and future grants.
• Strong understanding of Snowflake security features including network policies, dynamic data masking, and audit logging.
• Experience managing Snowflake virtual warehouses, resource monitors, and query performance tuning.
• Proficiency with SQL and the Snowflake Account Usage and Information Schema views.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform.
• Understanding of cloud networking concepts and SSO integrations.

The knowledge, experience and qualifications that will help

• Snowflake SnowPro certification (Core or Advanced).
• Experience with Snowpark, Cortex AI, Dynamic Tables, or Data Sharing / Clean Rooms.
• Knowledge of data governance tooling such as Alation or Collibra.
• Python scripting for Snowflake automation.
• Experience with SIEM integrations and regulated industry environments.
• Exposure to dbt or ELT tooling such as Fivetran or Matillion.

What you’ll be like

• Security-first mindset with proactive risk identification.
• Strong communication skills with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ownership mentality towards platform reliability and improvement.
• Collaborative approach across engineering, analytics, and security teams.
• Commitment to continuous learning and professional development.