Geo-Partitioning My Life

After almost three years at Snowflake, I’m making a move – literally. I’ve signed a contract with Snowflake Germany and will be relocating to Berlin, where I’ll keep doing essentially the same job, just from a different corner of the world.

The Journey

Several years ago, my husband and I made the decision that we wanted to move to Europe once our younger son graduated from high school. The goal was to target 2027. With my younger son graduating in 2026, this would give us the time to find something and move. In 2025, we took some steps to move in this direction. We sold a couple of rental properties that were more work for us than profit, and started to think about how we might accomplish this goal.

In October 2025, my counterpart in Europe let me know he would be leaving his position and was beginning the process of finding a successor. This was earlier than my husband and I were planning for, as my European colleague was planning to leave somewhere between February and June of 2026. I told my husband about this, expecting that we would just need to skip this opportunity and wait for the next one. To my surprise, my husband was quickly onboard and excited about the opportunity. Over the next few months, I had 4 different interviews for the position. The European leaders only wanted to bring someone in from another geography if they were sure I was perfect for the role. If they were going to have to train someone, they’d prefer to train someone who was already local to the EMEA region. Since I was interviewing for a job that I essentially already did, they ended up agreeing that I was the top choice.

Just as they were pulling my paperwork together, my current manager left Snowflake. This caused a significant issue, as our leadership in the sales organization decided that they no longer wanted my team in their department. Luckily there was a sister team in the engineering organization that thought we were worth keeping around. There was a solid day where I was fairly sure they were just going to lay us all off – that was a bad day.

Before the dust of that transition had even settled, I emphasized to my new manager how important this move was to me, and how I was perfectly willing to adjust my target location to align with a Snowflake Engineering office in Berlin. This manager jumped on it, and less than two months after the reorg, I signed a contract to join Snowflake in Berlin as of September first!

Why Move?

This move is really a personal choice for me. I lived in Europe for several years as a child and have taken several opportunities that presented themselves to travel to Europe over the years. With my younger son graduating, my husband and I feel like we’ve achieved the primary goal of parenting – getting our two children through high school alive and with a set of skills that allows them to function as adults. It’s our turn now, to get a bit of travel and adventure in. Living in Europe will allow us to explore and learn all kinds of new things. I may have mentioned before that I thrive on change, and that change doesn’t have to only come from my workplace.

The Job

With that last reorg, my job has changed a bit. I was a Principal Performance Architect on the AFE team in sales – essentially a technical overlay speciality in the sales organization. My primary goal was to help our Solution Engineers(SEs) build sponsorship and to unblock use cases from consuming Snowflake when the blocker was performance or price/performance in nature. In practice, that meant that SEs came to my team with specific performance challenges and we helped them solve those performance challenges. Sometimes that involved customer education and other times, it involved directing them over to the right team in engineering. It involved also playing a thought leadership role, and creating content for Snowflake.

My new role is as a Senior Performance Engineer in the engineering organization. I still spend most of my time in deep technical analysis and customer-facing work. My role now also includes identifying performance issues and helping engineering improve the Snowflake product based on real-world usage. Unfortunately, content creation is not really a part of this role. In some ways, that is sad, because that is one of the ways I excelled in my role. On the other hand, I no longer have to decide whether a piece of content should be written at work for my day job, or on my own time and resources for this blog. I plan to continue sharing through this blog. I still enjoy exploring the technical and data topics I encounter and sharing the ones I think others will find useful.

The Move

I’m very much looking forward to this move. Professionally, I’ll be working more closely with a European colleague I really enjoy collaborating with and already learn a great deal from. Assuming the visa paperwork all comes together as planned, I’ll be relocating to Berlin on September 1st. Apparently, geo-partitioning applies to people too. Same workload, new region — and I’m excited to see what this next deployment looks like!