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Snowflake is seeking a Principal Forward Deployed Engineer to join the Frontier Engineering team, which embeds directly with Snowflake's most strategic customers to design, build, and deploy production-grade AI systems. At the Principal level, you will serve as the senior technical counterpart to CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and chief architects at enterprise customers, setting the technical direction for the Frontier Engineering organization.
Key responsibilities include:
- Serving as a trusted technical partner to customer engineering leadership, building peer-level relationships with CTOs, VPs of Engineering, chief architects, and heads of data/AI at strategic accounts
- Leading architectural steering, technical reviews, and executive strategy alignment to shape customer AI roadmaps
- Owning end-to-end technical execution and outcomes across Snowflake's most complex, high-visibility AI engagements
- Writing production code and working prototypes on critical customer program components, and reviewing designs and code to set engineering standards
- Leading how the team measures and improves AI quality, converting ambiguous customer goals into clear, testable evaluation standards
- Mentoring Senior and Staff engineers, raising engineering standards across the organization, and partnering with cross-functional leads on complex technical initiatives
- Traveling to customer sites, spending at least 25% of time onsite working with customers
Snowflake's Frontier Engineering team focuses on shipping AI applications that run in complex enterprise environments, working on hard problems with real stakes alongside deeply technical, customer-obsessed engineers.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 15+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 3 years building and shipping production AI/ML or agentic systems at enterprise scale
- Proven track record as a trusted technical advisor to CTOs and executive engineering leaders at large enterprises
- Demonstrated success converting client/field delivery patterns into reusable platforms, tools, frameworks, or open-source libraries
- Deep expertise in production AI architectures, including RAG pipelines, multi-step agentic systems, evaluation frameworks, and guardrails
- Hands-on builder who writes and reviews production code and stays close to implementation
- Strong systems mindset with exceptional technical communication skills across deeply technical and executive audiences
BONUS:
- Experience shipping features into a commercial data or AI platform based on customer requirements
- Active contributions to open-source AI frameworks, technical publications, or industry speaking engagements
- Familiarity with Cortex AI, Snowpark, or modern enterprise data infrastructure platforms
