Snowflake provides a predefined set ofsystem-defined rolesthat enforce Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). These roles ensure structured governance and centralized privilege management across accounts. The primary system-defined roles include:

ACCOUNTADMIN, the highest-privileged role, responsible for global account-level activities such as billing, governance, replication, and cross-region/cloud configuration. It has implicit ownership of all objects.

SECURITYADMINmanages users, roles, MFA, and all privilege grants. This role ensures operational control over user lifecycle management while supporting separation of duties from ACCOUNTADMIN.

SYSADMINmanages objects such as databases, schemas, tables, warehouses, and other compute objects. It is the default role for data engineering and data platform teams needing full control of object creation and maintenance.

DATABASEADMINdoes not exist as a system-defined role—it is typically user-created for customization. System roles form a foundational security model for controlled privilege escalation and governance.

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