Engineering Deep Dive Series

Hosted by Snowflake Toronto
Snowflake’s highly technical Engineering Deep Dive series is led by Engineers for Engineers - no recruiting, sales, or marketing. These events, catered to senior, principal, or distinguished+ engineers, feature Snowflake’s senior most engineers discussing hard core engineering problems they solved in distributed systems, databases, governance & security, and other domains. 

Come join us at the next event at our Downtown Toronto hub for an evening packed with food, beverages and your fellow senior engineers from tech companies in the GTA area!

Check back later for more details on the next event. 
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PREVIOUS EVENTS

003 | Native Apps Architecture w. Scott Gray
AUGUST 2023 — KITCHENER
This session detailed the core architecture of Snowflake and Native Apps,  and the specific challenges the Toronto team is tackling in bringing it to life.

Scott Gray, a Principal Engineer here at Snowflake Toronto, leads the core of our Native Application Framework. He’s currently focusing on how Data Applications get built, run, and upgraded within the Snowflake platform in a scalable, reliable, and secure way. Scott has worked for over a decade at Apple and IBM previously, in Team Lead and Chief Architect roles focusing on large-scale technologies like Apple’s CloudKit which supports over a billion devices, and IBM’s BigSQL and Open Platform for Hadoop.
002 | Data Governance and Data Clean Rooms w. David Schultz
APRIL 2023
Data is the lifeblood of today's organizations. However, as organizations leverage increasingly vast and diverse data assets, they face challenges in effectively cataloging and governing their data. This talk described how Snowflake built the leading global data governance platform, enabling companies to understand and manage their data at scale, protect individual privacy and confidential information, and meet compliance obligations. Schultz also examined how Snowflake Global Data Clean Rooms addresses concerns around privacy and compliance that often limit the types of data that can be used in collaborative applications. We discussed how our solution builds on foundational technologies, such as data policies, differential privacy, and Snowflake's Native Application Framework.

David Schultz is a Principal Software Engineer at Snowflake focused on building solutions to help companies govern vast amounts of data effectively. Through Snowflake's governance and privacy platform, Snowflake customers can manage and organize their data at scale, identify and protect sensitive data, and unlock the power of data while respecting individual privacy and meeting compliance obligations. Before joining Snowflake, David worked at Google Cloud, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems. He earned his PhD from MIT, where he studied information flow control, distributed systems, and cryptography under Barbara Liskov.
001 | From Cloud Data to a Cloud Application Platform w. S Muralidhar
NOVEMBER 2022
A modern Application Platform provides the ability for the development, global distribution, installation, execution, providing fine grained security controls for consumers of the application, protecting their data and environment from the application, as well as protecting the intellectual property of the application developer. This session walked through how the core architecture of Snowflake enables this ability, and specific challenges the Toronto team is tackling in bringing it to life.

Murali is one of the two Technical Fellows at Snowflake. Being with the company for over 5 years, he has architected and led company wide, large scale initiatives with significant complexity. He focuses on Data Infrastructure, Metadata Framework, and Product Platform areas and serves as the key architect reviewing technical designs, strategy, and multi-year visions. Murali has previously worked in very senior roles at Facebook, Microsoft, and Oracle, having over 25 years of experience.

Meet the Leadership Team
Qaiser Habib
 As our local Canadian Site Lead & Director of Engineering, Qaiser brings a wealth of leadership experience from industries ranging from AI/ML to E-Commerce to Operations. Prior to Snowflake, Qaiser built and led DoorDash’s International expansion engineering org, and Amazon’s Labor Planning product lines right here in Toronto. 
Johnston Chu
 As one of the most tenured members of the Snowflake Engineering team, Johnston has played multiple roles since the early days of Snowflake ranging from a hands-on engineer building Security & Data Sharing features, to a Senior leader building out our Native Applications organization. Johnston moved back from the Bay Area to Toronto to kick start our Toronto Engineering presence. Previously, Johnston has worked on the Market Risk and Exchange teams at Goldman Sachs and Microsoft respectively.
Karol Bienkowski
 As an engineering manager, Karol is building Snowflake’s Native Apps foundation team in Toronto. Karol joined us after spending almost 10 years at Amazon. He spent the last 3 years at AWS where he led the control plane team for Aurora Serverless, cloud-native relational database. Before, he oversaw big data and machine learning implementations within Amazon’s supply chain.
Michael Li
 Michael has over 20 years of industry experience in software engineering as a development manager, technical lead, and developer. He joined the Native Apps team at Snowflake earlier this year and is leading the Native Apps Provider Platform initiative. Prior to Snowflake, Micheal was a Principal Software Engineer at Huawei Technologies where he led the development and delivery of openLooKeng, a distributed, low latency data engine. Prior to Huawei Technologies, he was a technical lead for several micro services of IBM’s Watson Health Cloud Platform. Michael is passionate about delivering the best in class technologies that will help customers develop, deliver, and run data applications in Snowflake’s ecosystem.