Snowflake
Principal Forward Deployed Engineer I, Frontier Engineering
$264K–$380K
US-CA-Menlo Park · Hybrid · Principal · Full-time · Posted Oct 15, 2026
- Experience
- 15+ years in software engineering, including at least 3 years building and shipping production AI/ML or agentic systems at enterprise scale.
About the job
Leads technical strategy and hands-on delivery of production AI systems for Snowflake’s largest enterprise customers.
What you'll do
- Set architecture and technical direction for complex customer AI deployments; advise customer engineering executives and shape AI roadmaps.
- Build and review production code, lead AI quality evaluation, and mentor engineers.
- Spend at least 25% of time onsite with customers.
What they ask for
- 15+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 3 years building and shipping production AI/ML or agentic systems at enterprise scale.
- Track record as a trusted technical advisor to CTOs and executive engineering leaders at large enterprises.
- Demonstrated success turning 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.
Nice to have
- Experience shipping customer-driven features into a commercial data or AI platform; contributions to open-source AI frameworks, technical publications, or industry speaking.
- Familiarity with Cortex AI, Snowpark, or modern enterprise data infrastructure platforms.
Pay
$264K – $379.5K (base salary)
Tools
RAG, Cortex AI, Snowpark
AI focus
Designs, builds, deploys, and evaluates production-grade enterprise AI systems, including agentic systems; establishes AI quality standards and guardrails.
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