VP, Head of Forward Deployed Engineering
Snorkel AI· 310 - DaaS FDE
Hybrid (New York, NY), Hybrid (San Francisco, CA)$268.8k - $403kfull-timePosted 7mo ago
About the role
Senior technical leader responsible for building, scaling, and governing Snorkel AI’s Forward Deployed Engineering organization, delivering reusable data pipelines, evaluations, augmentations, and environments for enterprise and AI lab customers.
Responsibilities
- Lead and scale the FDE organization: set the vision, define the operating model and org design, and align team plans and strategy with company priorities.
- Drive hiring in hypergrowth: build a strong bench of engineering managers and tech leads, and maintain a high hiring bar while scaling to 100+ engineers.
- Coach and develop EMs and TLMs who run pods of FDEs, helping them grow into cross-delivery leaders.
- Drive reuse across the organization: identify patterns across bespoke deliveries, create first versions, and partner with Platform Engineering to scale them company-wide.
- Set engineering standards for FDE operations, including pipeline design, data evaluation and verification, delivery sign-off, and root cause analysis.
- Establish FDE as the final point of control for delivery quality: define quality bars and own sign-off on every dataset shipped.
- Own pipeline cost and performance (token and compute costs, throughput, latency) and meet targets and forecasts.
- Stay deeply involved in pipeline architecture: review designs, identify weaknesses, and propose improvements for quality, cost, and reuse.
- Plan and adjust capacity as priorities shift, rebalancing teams while preserving delivery commitments.
Qualifications
- 10+ years in software or ML engineering, including 5+ years leading multiple teams as a manager of managers.
- Experience scaling an engineering organization of ~100 engineers, owning planning, strategy, and alignment with company needs.
- Strong background in software or ML engineering; background in ML infrastructure or data platforms strongly preferred.
- Experience building and shipping AI/ML systems to production with automated verification for shipping readiness.
- Track record of hiring and scaling engineering teams through hypergrowth.
- Deep technical fluency in architecture reviews and meaningful design changes; direct experience with LLM application stacks, agents, orchestration, and LLM-based pipelines.
- Strong customer accountability: delivers on customer intent and adapts to evolving needs.
Skills
Required:Leadership and people managementSystems architecture and designProduction ML systems and verificationLLM application stacks (agents, orchestration, pipelines)
Nice to have:ML infrastructure and data platforms
Benefits
- Competitive compensation package with salary range $268,800—$403,000 USD.
- Hybrid work locations: New York City, NY and San Francisco, CA (Hybrid).
- Equitable employment opportunity and commitment to diversity and accommodation.
Last updated Oct 7, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
About Snorkel AI
Shaping how AI learns through better data
Snorkel AI delivers the highest quality specialized datasets for frontier LLMs and enterprise models.
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