Senior Principal Forward Deployed Engineer, Frontier Engineering

The role

This person will serve as a senior technical authority and architectural leader for a portfolio of strategic customer engagements. They will design, build, and deploy production-grade AI systems and set technical direction for executive leadership.

What you will do

• Build peer-level relationships with CTOs, VPs of Engineering, chief architects, and heads of data and AI
• Lead architectural steering, technical reviews, and executive strategy alignment
• Set technical strategy, architecture, and execution model across multiple AI engagements
• Translate customer needs into product requirements and partner with Product and Engineering leaders
• Write production code and working prototypes
• Review designs and code
• Define organization-level standards for evaluation, observability, reliability, security, guardrails, and responsible deployment
• Mentor Principal, Staff, and Senior engineers
• Lead through influence across Engineering, Product, Sales, and other cross-functional teams
• Travel to customer sites

Required qualifications

• 15+ years of software engineering experience
• 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, reference architectures, or open-source libraries
• Deep expertise in production AI architectures including RAG pipelines, multi-step agentic systems, evaluation frameworks, guardrails, observability, security, and operating models
• Hands-on technical leader who writes and reviews production code
• Exceptional systems thinking and technical communication skills

Nice to have

• 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

About the company

Snowflake is empowering enterprises to achieve their full potential. The company has a culture focused on impact, innovation, and collaboration.