Meet Shrikant Shanbhag, Director of Engineering at Snowflake. Based in San Mateo, California, Shrikant leads the Applications and UI team, working to build the best visual user experience to make the Snowflake platform a delight to use. In today’s blog, he shares his career journey and what motivated him to leave Google for the Snowflake team.

Last year, I quit my job at Google to join Snowflake. Upon sharing the news, I was met with an onslaught of questions.

“Why did you leave Google?”
“Why Snowflake?”
“What is Snowflake?”

That last question came from my panicking parents when they caught wind of the switch that I was about to make.

It’s been six months since I joined Snowflake to lead the Applications and UI team, and it’s time I reflect on how I arrived at this decision. This is my attempt to explain it all.

The Early Days

Let’s take a step back in time to the spring of ‘09. I joined the Google Sheets team as someone earmarked for working on the backend. As fate would have it, Sheets was about to undergo a rewrite for the frontend and as someone who wrote some Javascript during my internship, I was drafted to be the fourth engineer on the rewrite team. This started my amazing journey at Google. Under the mentorship and guidance of some of the best leaders I have worked with, I worked my way through helping build the frontend, the backend, the iOS and Android teams, the ML and NLP features before eventually leading the entire Sheets engineering team.

Realizing Full Potential

After 12 fulfilling years at Google, I was ready for a change. The opportunity to lead Snowflake’s Applications and UI engineering team - working closely with Greg Czajkowski, Snowflake’s head of engineering, was enticing as I could leverage my learnings to help build stellar teams.

Snowflake is one of those companies that is growing bigger at a faster rate every time you look at it. This only happens when you have a product that customers love, and an incredible cross-functional team executing behind it. My Snowflake journey is beginning at an inflection point of the growth trajectory for the company. I believe that the Snowflake Data Cloud is the first to realize the full potential of the massive New Data Economy. Let me explain why:

#1 Snowflake is based on a solid platform foundation

Snowflake is the largest data cloud given its true multi-cloud nature. This gives us an asymmetric advantage over the competitors.
Snowflake’s core architecture separates compute from storage and allows customers the flexibility of configuring them independently based on their workload.
Multitenancy is built into the core of the Snowflake architecture, this allows us to enable truly frictionless data sharing between customers in a secure and compliant manner.

#2 A bold vision for the Data Cloud

Snowflake is not satisfied with being the largest and fastest growing data platform in the world. We want to enable rich experiences on top of the Snowflake platform for a variety of user segments such as Data Engineering, Data Science, Data Analytics and Visualization etc.
In addition to the first party experiences, we are investing in building out an application platform for developers to build and enhance the capabilities of Snowflake for our customers.
When you combine the first and third party experiences with seamless sharing and monetization via the Data Marketplace, the Snowflake Data Cloud creates strong network effects that unlock a lot of value in the ecosystem.

#3 Driven by outstanding culture

Our core values reflect in the products we put out into the world as well as in the day-to-day interactions across the board. The pride we have in our quality and customer obsession is infectious.
The focus within Engineering is to hold a high bar on both Quality and Velocity which is an important cultural differentiator. Most companies tend to focus on either one at the expense of the other but that inhibits the rate of innovation over time.

Translating Vision into Reality

So, where does my team come into the picture in all this? The Applications and UI team owns the interface that will bring the Snowflake vision to life. Our team’s mission is to build the single best visual user experience in the industry, making the world's most powerful data and applications platform dazzle.

To make this happen we are focusing the following:

Get out of the user's way. Our customers care about solving their problems rather than using our features. All of our experiences are built keeping the critical user journeys in mind.
Doubling down on Snowflake’s strengths. The underlying platform effortlessly scales to manage different customer workloads and use cases. Unifying UI workflows across user segments aims to magnify the utility of the overall product similarly.
Build a strong UI foundation. Delivering a consistent experience across the various user segments is the key to success for the UI. This is only possible through long term investments in design language and shared components.

We are a growing team with some of the best frontend and full-stack engineers in the industry focused on delivering on this mission. We are looking for engineering talent to help us grow using a best-of-breed tech stack (React, Typescript, Node.JS, Kubernetes, Go). If that excites you, reach out to me. Let’s bring your passion for delighting customers and deep experience building cutting edge web apps to build the future of the Data Cloud.

And as for my parents? While they may not fully grasp what Snowflake does yet, they are happy to see my energy and excitement about working here everyday :).

-Shrikant.