Senior Principal Forward Deployed Engineer, Frontier Engineering
Snowflake· enterprise· Data platform· Oct 16, 2026 · 12d ago
US-CA-Menlo Park
Hybrid
Full-time
Principal
$304K–$437K
15+ years exp
Job description
At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise. To usher in this new era, we seek AI-native thinkers across every function who are energized by the opportunity to reinvent how they work. You don’t just use tools; you possess an innate curiosity, treating AI as a high-trust collaborator that is core to how you solve problems and accelerate your impact. We look for low-ego individuals who thrive in dynamic and fast-moving environments and move with an experimental mindset — who rapidly test emerging capabilities to discover simpler, more powerful ways to deliver results. At Snowflake, your role isn't just to execute a function, but to help redefine the future of how work gets done.
Snowflake is about empowering enterprises to achieve their full potential, and people too. With a culture that's all in on impact, innovation, and collaboration, Snowflake is the sweet spot for building big, moving fast, and taking technology and careers to the next level.
We are hiring a Principal Forward Deployed Engineer II for our Frontier Engineering team. This team embeds directly with Snowflake's most strategic customers to design, build, and deploy production-grade AI systems . At the IC6 level, you serve as the senior technical authority and architectural leader for a portfolio of high-impact customer engagements. You operate as a peer technical advisor to CTOs, VPs of Engineering, chief architects, and heads of data and AI, setting technical direction that extends beyond individual accounts and influences how Snowflake delivers AI solutions at scale.
AS A PRINCIPAL FORWARD DEPLOYED ENGINEER II YOU WILL:
- 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.
OUR IDEAL CANDIDATE WILL HAVE:
- 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.
BONUS POINTS FOR THE FOLLOWING:
- 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.
WHY JOIN FRONTIER ENGINEERING AT SNOWFLAKE?
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.
How do you want to make your impact?
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 careers.snowflake.com
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