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Senior Principal Forward Deployed Engineer, Frontier Engineering

Snowflake Inc.· Engineering
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Hybrid (US-CA-Menlo Park)$304k - $437kFull-timePosted 1w ago

About the role

Senior technical leadership role embedding with Snowflake's strategic customers to design, build, and deploy production-grade AI systems; leads architectural direction, customer engagements, and cross-functional collaboration to scale AI solutions enterprise-wide.

Responsibilities

  • Serve as the senior technical authority and architectural leader for customer engineering leadership: build durable relationships with CTOs, VPs of Engineering, chief architects, and heads of data and AI at strategic accounts; lead architectural steering, technical reviews, and executive strategy alignment; shape multi-year AI roadmaps across a portfolio of customers.
  • Drive Architecture and Technical Strategy Across a Portfolio of High-Stakes Deployments: set technical strategy, architecture, and execution model across multiple complex AI engagements; own end-to-end outcomes; arbitrate cross-system tradeoffs; establish scalable patterns across customers and teams.
  • Influence Snowflake Product Direction: translate customer needs into product requirements and drive adoption of capabilities that improve outcomes.
  • Stay hands-on and set the engineering bar: write production code and prototypes on critical parts of customer programs; review designs and code.
  • Set the AI quality and reliability bar: define standards for evaluation, observability, reliability, security, guardrails, and responsible deployment; convert goals into measurable, testable criteria.
  • Provide technical leadership and develop senior technical talent: mentor engineers at various levels; raise engineering standards; influence across Engineering, Product, Sales, and other teams.
  • Travel to Customer Sites: spend at least 25% of time onsite with customers.

Qualifications

  • 15+ years of software engineering experience with a sustained track record in production AI/ML or agentic systems at enterprise scale.
  • Proven track record as trusted technical advisor to CTOs and executive leaders; ability to set direction across multiple strategic accounts.
  • Demonstrated success in turning client delivery patterns into reusable platforms, tools, or reference architectures adopted broadly.
  • Deep expertise in production AI architectures (RAG pipelines, multi-step agentic systems, evaluation frameworks, guardrails, observability, security, enterprise operating models).
  • Hands-on technical leader who writes and reviews production code and stays close to implementation.
  • Exceptional communication skills for both technical and executive audiences; ability to influence without formal authority.

Skills

Required:Software engineeringTechnical leadershipExecutive stakeholder management
Last updated Oct 22, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Snowflake Inc.

The Data Platform Built for Data Teams.

Snowflake powers AI, data engineering, applications, and analytics on a trusted, scalable AI Data Cloud—eliminating silos and accelerating innovation.

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