Vivek Raghunathan, SVP of Engineering @ Snowflake, joins the Engineering Leadership Community Podcast to discuss all things AI – most importantly, how Snowflake is utilizing AI internally to iterate faster with smaller, focused teams. Vivek shares how AI and lower coding costs ultimately help Snowflake implement tighter feedback loops between customer & eng teams to speed up product development rollout and how Snowflake empowers their orgs to upskill when it comes to AI. Jerry & Vivek also break down what quality leadership looks like across the board and the role of AI in shaping today’s eng leaders.

ABOUT VIVEK RAGHUNATHAN

Vivek Raghunathan is Snowflake's SVP of Engineering. Before joining Snowflake, Vivek co-founded Neeva, one of the first AI-native search engines for consumers, which was acquired by Snowflake in 2023. Prior to that, he spent more than a decade at Google, where he led YouTube monetization and helped launch Google Now.

ABOUT SNOWFLAKE

Snowflake is the data and AI platform that many of the world's largest organizations rely on to power their most critical operations. Whether a bank is approving a loan, a retailer is optimizing its supply chain, or a hospital is bringing together patient data, Snowflake helps organizations unify data, apply AI, and make faster, more informed decisions. Today, over 13,900 companies rely on Snowflake to turn their data into business value, with enterprise-grade security, governance, and scale built-in.

SHOW NOTES:

Where Snowflake is on their AI adoption journey (0:57)
Using AI to help eng orgs meet maximum velocity (3:04)
Defining traits of engineers who successfully leverage agentic tools (5:55)
The benefit of cross collaborative skillsets for eng leaders (8:53)
How AI is helping orgs test infrastructure rewrites effectively & less expensively (10:09)
Discovering AI patterns @ Snowflake (11:44)
Why Snowflake gives teams a week off to learn the necessary AI tools (16:37)
Compressing the product dev cycle with the help of AI (18:28)
Simplify eng teams / encourage fluidity of roles (19:49)
Vivek’s perspective on leveraging AI to best support customer needs (22:45)
Building control planes to support enterprises (24:30)
Methods for consolidating data / making it accessible to the entire org (27:18)
How AI shapes what a quality leader looks like (30:39)
The role of empathy in leadership (33:49)
Rapid fire questions (35:08)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

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