Principal Forward Deployed Engineer II, Frontier Engineering

Serve as the senior technical authority and architectural leader for customer engineering leadership: Build durable, peer-level relationships with CTOs, VPs of Engineering, chief architects, and heads of data and AI at Snowflake’s most strategic accounts. Lead architectural steering, technical reviews, and executive strategy alignment while shaping multi-year AI roadmaps across a portfolio of customers.

Drive Architecture and Technical Strategy Across a Portfolio of High-Stakes Deployments: Set the technical strategy, architecture, and execution model across multiple complex, high-visibility AI engagements. Own end-to-end outcomes, arbitrate the most difficult cross-system tradeoffs, and establish patterns that scale across customers, teams, and business units.

Influence Snowflake Product Direction: Translate recurring customer needs and deployment learnings into clear product requirements, partner with Product and Engineering leaders, and drive adoption of capabilities that improve outcomes across the field.

Stay hands-on and set the engineering bar: Write production code and working prototypes on the most critical or ambiguous parts of customer programs, review designs and code, and demonstrate the technical depth and judgment expected across the organization.

Set the AI quality and reliability bar: Define organization-level standards for evaluation, observability, reliability, security, guardrails, and responsible deployment. Turn ambiguous customer goals into clear, testable measures and ensure those standards are applied consistently across engagements.

Provide technical leadership and develop senior technical talent: Mentor Principal, Staff, and Senior engineers; develop technical leads; raise engineering standards across the organization; and lead through influence across Engineering, Product, Sales, and other cross-functional teams.

Travel to Customer Sites: Spend at least 25% of your time onsite working with customers.

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, and setting technical direction across multiple strategic accounts or enterprise programs.

Demonstrated success converting client and field delivery patterns into reusable platforms, tools, frameworks, reference architectures, or open-source libraries adopted across teams or customers.

Deep expertise in production AI architectures—including RAG pipelines, multi-step agentic systems, evaluation frameworks, guardrails, observability, security, and operating models for enterprise-scale adoption.

Hands-on technical leader who writes and reviews production code, stays close to implementation, and can move from executive strategy to the critical technical details that determine whether a system succeeds.

Exceptional systems thinking and technical communication skills across deeply technical and executive audiences, with the ability to influence without formal authority and align multiple organizations around a common technical strategy.

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.

Frontier Engineering is where Snowflake’s AI platform meets reality. You’re not building demos, you’re shipping AI applications that run in some of the world’s most complex enterprise environments. At the IC6 level, you also define the reusable architectures, engineering standards, and product feedback loops that allow these solutions to scale across customers. You will work on hard problems with real stakes, alongside engineers who are deeply technical and customer-obsessed.

How do you want to make your impact?

Snowflake is growing fast, and we’re scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth. We are looking for people who share our values, challenge ordinary thinking, and push the pace of innovation while building a future for themselves and Snowflake.

For jobs located in the United States, please visit the job posting on the Snowflake Careers Site for salary and benefits information: careers.snowflake.com