Principal Forward Deployed Engineer II, Frontier Engineering

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

At a glance

The Principal Forward Deployed Engineer II joins the Frontier Engineering team to design, build, and deploy production-grade AI systems for Snowflake's most strategic customers.
Operating at the IC6 level, this role serves as a senior technical authority and architectural leader, influencing both customer strategy and Snowflake's internal product direction.
The position requires a hands-on leader who balances executive-level advisory duties with writing production code for critical, high-stakes AI engagements.

Build peer-level relationships with CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and chief architects to lead architectural steering and executive strategy alignment.
Set technical strategy, architecture, and execution models across multiple complex, high-visibility AI engagements.
Translate recurring customer needs and deployment learnings into clear product requirements for internal Engineering and Product teams.
Write production code and working prototypes for the most critical or ambiguous parts of customer programs.
Define organization-level standards for evaluation, observability, reliability, security, and responsible AI deployment.
Mentor Principal, Staff, and Senior engineers to raise engineering standards across the organization.
Travel to customer sites at least 25% of the time to work directly with strategic accounts.

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.
Demonstrated success converting client and field delivery patterns into reusable platforms, tools, frameworks, or reference architectures.
Deep expertise in production AI architectures, including RAG pipelines, multi-step agentic systems, evaluation frameworks, and guardrails.
Ability to move from executive strategy to critical technical details while maintaining hands-on implementation involvement.
Exceptional systems thinking and technical communication skills for both technical and executive audiences.

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.