Principal Forward Deployed Engineer I, Frontier Engineering

US-CA-Menlo Park · 15+ years experience · Full-time · Onsite · Posted Oct 15, 2026

At a glance

Snowflake is hiring a Principal Forward Deployed Engineer for the Frontier Engineering team to embed directly with strategic customers and build production-grade AI systems.
In this role, you act as the senior technical counterpart to CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and chief architects, setting the technical direction for the organization.

Be the trusted technical partner to customer engineering leadership by building durable, peer-level relationships with CTOs, VPs of Engineering, chief architects, and heads of data/AI at strategic accounts.
Drive architecture and technical strategy across high-stakes deployments by owning end-to-end technical execution and outcomes across complex, high-visibility AI engagements.
Stay hands-on by writing production code and working prototypes on critical parts of customer programs and reviewing designs and code.
Own the AI quality bar by leading how the team measures and improves AI quality and turning ambiguous customer goals into clear, testable evaluation standards.
Provide technical leadership and mentorship by mentoring Senior and Staff engineers, raising engineering standards, and partnering with cross-functional leads.
Travel to customer sites, spending at least 25% of your time onsite working with customers.

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 both deeply technical and executive audiences.

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.

Travel to customer sites is required, spending at least 25% of time onsite working with customers.