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Snowflake's Frontier Engineering team is seeking a Principal Forward Deployed Engineer II (IC6) to serve as a senior technical authority and architectural leader for a portfolio of high-impact customer engagements. This role embeds directly with Snowflake's most strategic customers to design, build, and deploy production-grade AI systems at enterprise scale.
You will serve as a peer technical advisor to CTOs, VPs of Engineering, chief architects, and heads of data and AI, setting technical direction that extends beyond individual accounts and influences how Snowflake delivers AI solutions at scale. Key responsibilities include:
- Building durable peer-level relationships with executive engineering leadership at strategic accounts and leading architectural steering, technical reviews, and executive strategy alignment while shaping multi-year AI roadmaps across a portfolio of customers.
- Setting technical strategy, architecture, and execution models across multiple complex, high-visibility AI engagements. Own end-to-end outcomes, arbitrate difficult cross-system tradeoffs, and establish patterns that scale across customers, teams, and business units.
- Translating recurring customer needs and deployment learnings into clear product requirements, partnering with Product and Engineering leaders to drive adoption of capabilities that improve outcomes across the field.
- Writing production code and working prototypes on the most critical or ambiguous parts of customer programs, reviewing designs and code, and demonstrating technical depth and judgment.
- Defining organization-level standards for evaluation, observability, reliability, security, guardrails, and responsible deployment of AI systems. Converting ambiguous customer goals into clear, testable measures.
- Mentoring Principal, Staff, and Senior engineers; developing technical leads; raising engineering standards across the organization; and leading through influence across Engineering, Product, Sales, and cross-functional teams.
- Spending at least 25% of time onsite working with customers.
Snowflake is positioning itself as the platform for the agentic enterprise, seeking AI-native thinkers who treat AI as a high-trust collaborator and move with an experimental mindset. Frontier Engineering is where Snowflake's AI platform meets reality—shipping AI applications that run in complex enterprise environments, not building demos.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 15+ years of software engineering experience, including a sustained track record of building and shipping production AI/ML or agentic systems at enterprise scale.
- Proven track record serving as a trusted technical advisor to CTOs and executive engineering leaders at large enterprises, and setting technical direction across multiple strategic accounts or enterprise programs.
- Demonstrated success converting client and field delivery patterns into reusable platforms, tools, frameworks, reference architectures, or open-source libraries adopted across teams or customers.
- Deep expertise in production AI architectures—including RAG pipelines, multi-step agentic systems, evaluation frameworks, guardrails, observability, security, and operating models for enterprise-scale adoption.
- Hands-on technical leader who writes and reviews production code, stays close to implementation, and can move from executive strategy to critical technical details.
- Exceptional systems thinking and technical communication skills across deeply technical and executive audiences, with the ability to influence without formal authority and align multiple organizations around a common technical strategy.
BONUS:
- Experience leading cross-organizational technical initiatives that improve how enterprise AI solutions are designed, deployed, and adopted.
- Active contributions to open-source AI frameworks, technical publications, or industry speaking engagements.
- Familiarity with Cortex AI, Snowpark, or modern enterprise data infrastructure platforms.
