Staff/Principal AI Engineer (Cortex Code)

Location: US-CA-Menlo Park

Salary: $236,000–$309,750 per year

Company

Snowflake provides the AI Data Cloud and develops production-ready AI applications for businesses.

What you will do

• Define agent behavior and quality strategy for next-generation agentic coding tasks.
• Design experimentation pipelines and tooling for prompt, tool, and workflow iteration.
• Lead quality postmortems, cluster failure modes, and prioritize engineering and modeling improvements.
• Align product, infrastructure, and applied AI stakeholders on quality standards for critical customer workflows.
• Ensure reproducible runs, stable datasets, versioning, and operational clarity in production quality systems.
• Mentor engineers and improve evaluation practices across the team.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Statistics, or a related field.
• 10+ years of experience shipping AI/ML-backed software in production, including technical leadership, cross-team delivery, and mentoring.
• Experience building and operating evaluation harnesses, measurement systems, or experimentation loops for LLM and agent systems.
• Strong proficiency in at least two of Python, TypeScript, and Go.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence engineering and product partners without authority.

Nice to have

• Experience with agentic coding tools, including IDE or CLI agents, and understanding of model strengths, failure modes, and prompting limits.
• Background in data engineering pipelines, including dbt or Airflow, data modeling, analytics, retrieval, RAG, or semantic layers.
• Experience with LLM observability, safety, guardrails, or production release-gate quality systems.

Culture & Benefits

• AI-native, experimental approach to solving problems and improving work.
• High standards for rigor, reproducibility, and measurable quality.
• Fast-paced environment with short feedback loops and cross-functional collaboration.
• Opportunities to mentor engineers and shape team-wide engineering practices.