When it comes to fashion and engineering, Cecilia Wang proves that the devil is in the details.

From building dashboards to adding the finishing touch to her latest outfit, the Snowflake software engineer embraces creativity to solve complex technical challenges — and shows up as her most authentic self along the way. Below, she shares her journey from intern to full-time engineer, what it’s like working on the Snowhouse team, and how curiosity is the common denominator between her life as an engineer and as a Lolita fashion enthusiast.

Your passion for fashion started early. When did your passion for data (and Snowflake) begin?
I first joined Snowflake in 2021 as an intern on the Manageability team. During that time, I worked on resolving a race condition with Connection objects and implementing an exponential backoff mechanism for Domain Name System (DNS) retries to improve reliability. It was really impactful, interesting work, especially as an intern, but what drew me back full-time was the complexity and scale of the backend systems along with the possibilities of working on the Snowhouse team, which focuses on building and maintaining an internal infrastructure that allows us to gain insights into things like performance and forecasting.

If accessories make the outfit, then Snowhouse makes the platform. Tell us a little more about Snowhouse and how it is incorporated into Snowflake.
Snowhouse has a few major components. First, it serves as our main database — it’s essentially the central place where all the business analytics go. We store our logs, metrics, and other important data there. We're moving data from our Global Services (GS) systems into Snowhouse, which allows us to query, analyze, and even perform data science tasks.

The other big piece is the Snowflake Database, which includes account and org usage. That’s where we share key data with customers, like which tables they've created, what accounts they’re using, how much data they’re consuming, and so on.

What are you working on now and what are some of the biggest challenges?
Right now, I’m working on improving the performance of one of our most used tables, the Job table. This table sees a lot of traffic, so I’m focused on optimizing it.

Last year, I worked on a major project called the Snowhouse Split, which involved moving all data ingestion from the Snowhouse account to a separate Snowhouse core account. That project was one of the more challenging ones because it has so many different export types and pipelines to manage. Every deployment loads data into Snowhouse accounts, and we have loaders running for each export type — basically, each one is its own data pipeline. So just keeping track of everything and maintaining those systems is a big task.

Style and tech are always evolving. How do you keep up with new developments in engineering, and what’s your advice to someone eager to explore the field?
For me, it’s similar to how I approach fashion. I try to stay curious — talking to people, connecting with other teams, and learning what new features or tools Snowflake is offering.

When you're stuck on a problem, other people’s perspectives can be incredibly helpful. Even casual conversations can lead to something that could help your project. The connections you make are what really make the work meaningful.

From backend brilliance to front-end flair, check out open roles in engineering at Snowflake.

Cecilia Wang is a software engineer on Snowflake’s Snowhouse team. Prior to joining Snowflake in 2022, she held internships at Snowflake and Okta. She received her BS in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo.