Principal Forward Deployed Engineer I, Frontier Engineering

About the role

Snowflake is hiring a Principal Forward Deployed Engineer for its 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 act as the senior technical counterpart to CTOs, VPs of Engineering and chief architects at those customers, setting the technical direction for the Frontier Engineering organization. The role is based in Menlo Park, California.

Key responsibilities

• Build durable, peer-level relationships with customer engineering leadership such as CTOs, VPs of Engineering, chief architects and heads of data/AI, leading architectural steering, technical reviews and executive strategy alignment.
• Own end-to-end technical execution and outcomes across Snowflake's most complex, high-visibility AI engagements.
• Write production code and working prototypes on the most critical parts of customer programs, and review designs and code to set the bar for the team.
• Lead how the team measures and improves AI quality, turning ambiguous customer goals into clear, testable evaluation standards.
• Mentor Senior and Staff engineers, raise engineering standards and partner with cross-functional leads on complex technical initiatives.
• Spend at least 25% of your time onsite working with customers.

Required profile

• 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 or field delivery patterns into reusable platforms, tools, frameworks or open-source libraries.
• Strong systems mindset with technical communication skills across deeply technical and executive audiences.

Required skills

• Deep expertise in production AI architectures, including RAG pipelines, multi-step agentic systems, evaluation frameworks and guardrails.
• Hands-on coding: writing and reviewing production code.
• Bonus points: experience shipping features into a commercial data or AI platform, open-source AI framework contributions, and familiarity with Cortex AI, Snowpark or other enterprise data infrastructure platforms.

For jobs located in the United States, salary and benefits information is available on the Snowflake careers site.