Principal Forward Deployed Engineer II (AI)

Location: Menlo Park, California, United States; at least 25% of the time onsite at customer sites.

Salary: $304K–$437K annually.

Company

Snowflake provides enterprise data and AI infrastructure and is developing production-grade AI solutions for complex enterprise environments.

What you will do

• Serve as the senior technical authority for strategic customer engagements and advise CTOs, VPs of Engineering, chief architects, and data and AI leaders.
• Set architecture, technical strategy, and execution models across multiple high-impact AI deployments.
• Build production code and prototypes, review designs and code, and resolve critical technical ambiguities.
• Define standards for AI evaluation, observability, reliability, security, guardrails, and responsible deployment.
• Translate recurring customer needs into product requirements and reusable platforms, tools, frameworks, and reference architectures.
• Mentor Principal, Staff, and Senior engineers and lead cross-functional technical initiatives across Engineering, Product, and Sales.

Requirements

• 15+ years of software engineering experience, including sustained experience building and shipping production AI/ML or agentic systems at enterprise scale.
• Experience advising CTOs and executive engineering leaders and setting technical direction across strategic enterprise programs.
• Deep expertise in production AI architectures, including RAG pipelines, multi-step agentic systems, evaluation frameworks, guardrails, observability, security, and enterprise operating models.
• Hands-on technical leadership with strong production coding, code review, systems thinking, and technical communication skills.
• Ability to influence without formal authority and align multiple organizations around a common technical strategy.
• Willingness to spend at least 25% of time onsite with customers.

Nice to have

• Experience leading cross-organizational initiatives for enterprise AI design, deployment, and adoption.
• Contributions to open-source AI frameworks, technical publications, or industry speaking.
• Familiarity with Cortex AI, Snowpark, or modern enterprise data infrastructure platforms.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on production AI applications used in complex enterprise environments.
• Collaborate with deeply technical, customer-focused engineers.
• Operate in an impact-oriented environment emphasizing innovation, experimentation, and collaboration.
• Shape reusable engineering standards and product feedback loops across customer engagements.