This article was written by Greg Czajkowski and originally appeared on the Snowflake Blog here: https://www.snowflake.com/blog/why-were-thrilled-to-be-opening-an-engineering-site-in-toronto/
2020 was a year of explosive growth for Snowflake in which we successfully expanded our product in new dimensions. Snowflake Engineering has always taken a bold approach to innovation, and with an ambitious roadmap for 2021 and beyond, we’re expanding the engineering team. Our customers are eager to see us deliver more and more amazing data technology.
To that end, Snowflake will be opening a new engineering site in Toronto later this year. Joining the existing locations in San Mateo, California; Bellevue, Washington; and Berlin, Germany, the Toronto-based office will expand the engineering footprint to four offices globally.
Toronto was an obvious choice for several reasons. It offers an exceptional pool of technical talent due to the presence of top schools like the University of Toronto and University of Waterloo, which has the largest engineering program in Canada. With its cosmopolitan openness, it ranks number 4 on a list of 50 cities identified as places that attract top talent in the high-tech sector. “Toronto’s open and multicultural environment attracts populations with diverse backgrounds,” said Snowflake Engineering Manager, Johnston Chu. “In conjunction with its proximity to top Canadian engineering universities, Toronto talents bring innovative mindsets with a global perspective to technology fronts like artificial intelligence and data applications.” A longtime Snowflake engineer, Chu will be relocating to Toronto in the coming months which will strengthen collaboration across the entire organization.
In fact, Snowflake already has a presence in Toronto since it acquired privacy-focused startup CryptoNumerics in 2020. “As the former CEO of CryptoNumerics and now Principal Product Manager at Snowflake, I cannot express how excited I am that Snowflake is opening an engineering site in Toronto with a focus on privacy,” Monica Holboke said. “Not only does Toronto have an incredible ecosystem that supports innovation and diversity, it also has a deep expertise in ML. Additionally, being able to build features that will address privacy use cases for Snowflake customers is incredibly rewarding.”
While privacy will continue to be a focus area for the team, the Toronto engineering center will lead a number of efforts over the next few years.
Toronto-based engineers will work with cutting-edge technologies and contribute to our company culture of putting customers first and taking initiative and ownership. Their work will continue changing how data is managed and shared (and how insights are obtained from data) across multiple industries. By joining the team, engineers will have a tremendous opportunity to make an impact.