Everyone thought AI would replace junior engineers. We’re hiring more of them

The biggest hiring myth in tech is that AI is making junior engineers obsolete. The logic seems sound: AI can write code, so why hire people to write more of it? Junior engineers have always learned on the job, fixing bugs and shipping small features until they build real judgment. Now that coding agents can handle much of that work, companies assume they can cut off the bottom rungs of the career ladder. At Snowflake, we’re making the opposite bet. Snowflake is a data and artificial intelligence platform that helps thousands of organizations like Goldman Sachs, Hyatt, Kraft Heinz, and United Rentals build with and get value from their data, apps, and AI. Junior engineers make up 70%–80% of our current hiring. We build and run infrastructure that global enterprises depend on. Because reliability and performance matter so much, we can’t hand those responsibilities to a junior engineer or a coding agent and walk away. The talent hierarchy is being rewritten I’ve spent most of my career in environments that rewarded raw implementation speed. At Google and YouTube, and later at my startup, Neeva, the engineers who stood out were the ones who could hold a lot of context in their head, …