Principal Forward Deployed Engineer I, Frontier Engineering

The role

You will embed with strategic customers to design, build, and deploy production-grade AI systems. You will act as a technical partner to customer engineering leadership and set technical direction for the Frontier Engineering organization.

What you will do

• Build relationships with CTOs, VPs of Engineering, chief architects, and heads of data/AI.
• Lead architectural steering, technical reviews, and executive strategy alignment.
• Own end-to-end technical execution and outcomes for complex AI engagements.
• Write production code and working prototypes.
• Review designs and code.
• Lead how the team measures and improves AI quality.
• Mentor Senior and Staff engineers.
• Partner with cross-functional leads to drive complex technical initiatives.
• Travel to customer sites.

Required qualifications

• 15+ years of software engineering experience.
• 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.
• Strong systems mindset with exceptional technical communication skills across technical and executive audiences.

Nice to have

• 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.

About the company

Snowflake is empowering enterprises to achieve their full potential. The Frontier Engineering team embeds with strategic customers to ship AI applications in complex enterprise environments.