Principal Forward Deployed Engineer II, Frontier Engineering

Snowflake•Menlo Park, CA

12d•$304,000 - $437,000

About The Position

Snowflake is hiring a Principal Forward Deployed Engineer II for its Frontier Engineering team. The team embeds with strategic customers to design, build, and deploy production-grade AI systems. At the IC6 level, this role is the senior technical authority and architectural leader for a portfolio of high-impact customer engagements, advising customer engineering executives and shaping technical direction beyond individual accounts. The role sets strategy and execution models for complex AI deployments, influences Snowflake product direction through customer feedback, and establishes standards for AI quality, reliability, security, and responsible deployment. It combines executive-level technical advising and organizational leadership with hands-on engineering, including writing production code and prototypes. The position requires spending at least 25% of time onsite with customers.

Requirements

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 experience as a trusted technical advisor to CTOs and executive engineering leaders at large enterprises, 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 leadership, including writing and reviewing production code and staying close to implementation while contributing at both executive-strategy and technical-detail levels.
Exceptional systems thinking and technical communication skills for technical and executive audiences.
Ability to influence without formal authority and align multiple organizations around a common technical strategy.

Nice To Haves

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.

Responsibilities

Build peer-level relationships with CTOs, VPs of Engineering, chief architects, and heads of data and AI at strategic customer accounts.
Lead architectural steering, technical reviews, and executive strategy alignment, and shape multi-year AI roadmaps across a portfolio of customers.
Set technical strategy, architecture, and execution models across complex, high-visibility AI engagements; own end-to-end outcomes and resolve difficult cross-system tradeoffs.
Establish patterns that scale across customers, teams, and business units.
Translate recurring customer needs and deployment learnings into product requirements; partner with Product and Engineering leaders and drive adoption of capabilities that improve customer outcomes.
Write production code and working prototypes for critical or ambiguous parts of customer programs, and review designs and code.
Define standards for AI evaluation, observability, reliability, security, guardrails, and responsible deployment; turn ambiguous customer goals into testable measures and ensure consistent application across engagements.
Mentor Principal, Staff, and Senior engineers; develop technical leads and raise engineering standards across the organization.
Lead through influence across Engineering, Product, Sales, and other cross-functional teams.
Spend at least 25% of time onsite working with customers.