Principal Forward Deployed Engineer (AI/ML)

Location: Menlo Park, California, United States; at least 25% of the role is spent onsite at customer locations.

Salary: $264,000–$379,500 annually.

Company

Snowflake provides an enterprise data and AI platform focused on helping organizations build and operate production-grade AI systems.

What you will do

• Act as a trusted technical partner to CTOs, VPs of Engineering, chief architects, and data and AI leaders.
• Own architecture, technical strategy, and end-to-end execution for complex AI deployments.
• Write production code and prototypes, review designs and code, and establish engineering standards.
• Define and improve AI quality through measurable evaluation standards, testing, and guardrails.
• Mentor Senior and Staff engineers and lead complex cross-functional technical initiatives.
• Travel to customer sites and spend at least 25% of working time onsite.

Requirements

• 15+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 3 years building and shipping production AI, ML, or agentic systems at enterprise scale.
• Experience advising CTOs and senior engineering leaders at large enterprises.
• Deep expertise in production AI architectures, including RAG pipelines, multi-step agentic systems, evaluation frameworks, and guardrails.
• Strong hands-on software engineering, systems thinking, and technical communication skills for technical and executive audiences.
• Experience turning field delivery patterns into reusable platforms, tools, frameworks, or open-source libraries.
• Ability to work onsite with customers for at least 25% of the time.

Nice to have

• Experience shipping customer-driven features into a commercial data or AI platform.
• Contributions to open-source AI frameworks, technical publications, or industry speaking engagements.
• Familiarity with Cortex AI, Snowpark, or modern enterprise data infrastructure platforms.

Culture & Benefits

• Impact-focused culture centered on innovation and collaboration.
• Work on production AI applications used in complex enterprise environments.
• Close collaboration with deeply technical, customer-focused engineers.
• Salary and benefits information is provided through the Snowflake Careers Site.