u/SeaYouLaterAllig8tor

I was recently contacted by a snowflake recruiter about applying for the solutions engineering role and I'm considering it. My main question for SEs is how is their work life balance and how much do they travel in general? I spoke with our orgs current SE and she told me she works a lot, like... It sounded like 60-80 hr weeks which doesn't sound appealing to me. That said, the benefits package and compensation seems really good. Are there any SEs here who can give me their opinion on this role at Snowflake?

I think it goes without saying that Foundry is a very polarizing, dare I say divisive tool, when comparing it agains the landscape of other cloud based tools in the market.

I am snowflake certified and have used Snowflake consistently over the past 6 years but over the past ~6 months I've been using Foundry daily for different tasks and it's interesting.

For the record, my native programming language (over the past 12yrs) is SQL but I'm getting more used to reading and writing python. The ability to use AI FDE (Foundry's version of Claude Code for those not familiar with it) is very powerful and really makes the platform's functionality accelerate.

With that said, Foundry's platform has so many tools it's a bit overwhelming. Sometimes you have multiple tools within the platform that do similar things.

Ultimately I still feel more at home in Snowflake but I'm trying to decipher what I enjoy doing in Foundry and what it's best at. I think it's real competitive advantage lives at the ontology layer and above (i.e. it's ability to leverage data within the ontology objects and provide value from them through application building and AI functionality).

It's a unique tool regardless and garners tons of hate from most of the data engineering community (or so it seems on here). I really don't see what's so terrible about it as compared to many other products. It's not trying to be a data warehouse (like Snowflake) or data lake (like Databricks). Its it's own thing entirely.

Feel free to add your thoughts based on your own personal experiences using the platform.

We're headed to Universal tomorrow with express pass. My wife noticed that on the Universal website this morning that Hagrids was no longer listed as having express. Is it true that express ends on July 1st for Hagrids or have they discontinued it already?

Ok, politics aside, if you had a choice to position your career down one of these paths which would you choose?
Preface: I've worked in Snowflake (and other snowflake integrated tools like dbt, etc) consistently the last 5-6 years. Recently a new company project has me working full-time in Foundry and I have mixed feelings about it. Foundry is a unique tool and just putting Foundry experience on my LinkedIn has recruiters already reaching out to me.
On the flip side I don't want my Snowflake experience to fall by the wayside. I've been approached for some Snowflake specific roles recently and I'm trying to decide between pursuing Snowflake full-time or sticking with Foundry for now.
Foundry, although I've hear people describe is as a "black box" compared to Snowflake, seems to generate more interest from recruiters because it's a more niche tool (that's growing quickly).
Snowflake on the other hand seems a lot more mainstream now (offering many opportunities but more people have experience in it).
Any thoughts from those having used both tools?

I'm a data engineer (title is solution architect but realistically at least 50% of my job is hands on engineering) who's got probably roughly 12 years of experience. My current company (which I've been with almost 2.5 yrs now) has shifted from relying on tools like Snowflake, dbt, Fivetran and others to using Palantir Foundry primarily because our largest client has decided to take the next 2+ years to build a new client platform with Foundry. To be clear, we still use and maintain multiple Snowflake accounts, dbt pipelines, etc. But my role has shifted to learning Foundry so I can support the business in this initiative. I've gone from a consulting role (building new client data environments) to more of a product developer role.

I've been approached by another company (much smaller company, a snowflake consulting shop) multiple times to come and join their team (I'm snowflake certified fyi). I'm kind of debating whether it's worth it long term to stay and continue learning Foundry or jump back into the consulting world doing Snowflake related work. My current company is very stable and my manager here is great, but I'm not sure if it would be to my advantage to jump back into the Snowflake world.

People on this sub seem to hate Foundry... But putting it on LinkedIn immediately caught the attention of multiple recruiters so... Idk.