Senior Principal Forward Deployed Engineer, Frontier Engineering

About the role

Snowflake is hiring a Principal Forward Deployed Engineer II for its Frontier Engineering team, which embeds directly with Snowflake's most strategic customers to design, build and deploy production-grade AI systems. At IC6 level, you act as the senior technical authority and architectural leader for a portfolio of high-impact customer engagements, advising CTOs, VPs of Engineering, chief architects and heads of data and AI on technical direction beyond individual accounts.

Key responsibilities

• Build peer-level relationships with CTOs, VPs of Engineering, chief architects and heads of data and AI at strategic accounts, and lead architectural steering, technical reviews and multi-year AI roadmaps.
• Set technical strategy, architecture and execution model across several complex, high-visibility AI engagements, own end-to-end outcomes and establish scalable patterns.
• Translate customer needs and deployment learnings into product requirements and drive adoption of capabilities that improve outcomes.
• Write production code and working prototypes on critical parts of customer programs, review designs and code, and set the engineering bar.
• Define organization-wide standards for evaluation, observability, reliability, security, guardrails and responsible deployment, turning customer goals into testable measures.
• Mentor Principal, Staff and Senior engineers, develop technical leads and lead through influence across Engineering, Product, Sales and other teams.
• Travel to customer sites at least 25% of the time.

Required profile

• 15+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of 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 across multiple strategic accounts.
• Demonstrated success turning client and field delivery patterns into reusable platforms, tools, frameworks, reference architectures or open-source libraries.
• Exceptional systems thinking and technical communication across technical and executive audiences, able to influence without formal authority.

Required skills

• Deep expertise in production AI architectures, including RAG pipelines, multi-step agentic systems, evaluation frameworks, guardrails, observability and security.
• Bonus points for experience leading cross-organizational technical initiatives, open-source AI framework contributions, and familiarity with Cortex AI, Snowpark or modern enterprise data platforms.

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