Forward Deployed Engineer, Frontier Engineering

Snowflake; Wellington; Hybrid; NZD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Snowflake is building a high-impact Frontier Engineering team to accelerate enterprise AI, seeking a hands-on Forward Deployed Engineer to work with strategic customers on production-grade AI systems using Snowpark and Cortex.

You will own end-to-end solutions, collaborate with data science and engineering teams, and travel up to 25% onsite with customers, shaping the future of Snowflake's AI platform.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience in CS/Engineering.
• At least 3 years of software engineering experience.
• Experience with LLMs and agentic workflows.
• Ability to define quality metrics and run evaluations.
• Excellent problem-solving and communication skills.
• Willingness to travel.

Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and deploy enterprise-grade AI solutions including AI agents.
• Own end-to-end lifecycle from prototype to production.
• Define quality metrics and evaluation frameworks.
• Design and ship high-quality code and data pipelines.
• Collaborate with customers and Snowflake teams.

Skills

LLMs

RAG workflows

Agentic AI

Python

SQL

Distributed systems

Travel willing

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Braintrust

LangSmith

Arize

Weave

Promptfoo

Snowpark

Job description

At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise. To usher in this new era, we seek AI-native thinkers across every function who are energized by the opportunity to reinvent how they work. You don’t just use tools; you possess an innate curiosity, treating AI as a high-trust collaborator that is core to how you solve problems and accelerate your impact. We look for low-ego individuals who thrive in dynamic and fast-moving environments and move with an experimental mindset — who rapidly test emerging capabilities to discover simpler, more powerful ways to deliver results. At Snowflake, your role isn't just to execute a function, but to help redefine the future of how work gets done.

At Snowflake, we are building a high-impact team to help the world’s most innovative companies unlock the power of AI. As a Forward Deployed Engineer on our Frontier Engineering team, you will be a hands-on builder and a key technical partner to our most strategic customers, placing you at the forefront of the enterprise AI revolution. You won’t just work with cutting-edge technology – you’ll deploy it to solve real-world business problems at scale, building production‑grade AI systems using Snowpark, Cortex, and our native LLM capabilities.

IN THIS ROLE AT SNOWFLAKE, YOU WILL:

Build Customer Solutions

Architect, build, and deploy enterprise‑grade AI solutions, including sophisticated AI agents. Own the end-to-end lifecycle of your workstreams – from prototype to production – directly solving customers’ most complex business challenges.

Own the Quality of What You Ship

Define what "good" means for the systems you build. Translate ambiguous customer goals into measurable quality metrics, evaluation frameworks, and golden datasets – then run systematic eval loops to hill‑climb on agent quality, catch regressions before customers do, and continuously raise the bar on accuracy, faithfulness, and safety. Treat measurement as a first‑class part of building, not an afterthought.

Deliver with Velocity

Rapidly design, iterate, and ship high‑quality code and pipelines. Translate ambiguous business objectives into robust, scalable, and performant solutions using Python and SQL.

Productionize AI at Scale

Own the full implementation lifecycle for your solutions – from prototype through deployment, monitoring, and optimization in secure, large‑scale production environments. Build the safety guardrails, observability, and human‑review workflows that keep AI applications reliable and trustworthy, and close the loop from production traces and user feedback back into your evals so quality compounds over time.

Be a Technical Partner

Partner directly with customer data science and engineering teams as a hands‑on technical resource and trusted advisor on how to best leverage AI for their business challenges.

Collaborate to Innovate

Work cross‑functionally with Snowflake’s Product and Engineering teams, sharing real‑world feedback from the field to directly influence the future of Snowflake’s AI platform.

Have the opportunity to travel

Spend at least 25% of your time onsite, working closely with Snowflake’s most strategic customers.

WE'RE LOOKING FOR CANDIDATES WHO HAVE:

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Willingness to travel.
• Proven experience building applications using LLMs, especially with technologies like RAG and agentic workflows.
• Hands‑on experience defining quality metrics and running evaluations for LLM or agent systems, and using evals to systematically improve quality.
• Excellent problem‑solving and communication skills, with an ability to articulate complex technical concepts to diverse stakeholders.
• Comfort with ambiguity and a desire to thrive in a fast‑paced, ever‑changing Generative AI environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building eval sets from production traces and synthetic data, and running structured experimentation (A/B tests, ablations, offline evals) to compare prompts, models, or agent architectures.
• Familiarity with eval and observability tooling (e.g., Braintrust, LangSmith, Arize, Weave, Promptfoo) or experience building custom eval harnesses.
• Experience with failure‑mode analysis on agent or RAG systems – categorizing errors (hallucination, retrieval miss, planning failure, tool misuse) and driving each down with targeted evals.
• Hands‑on experience with the MLOps lifecycle, including model deployment, monitoring, and evaluation in a cloud environment (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Familiarity with core data science libraries and tools (e.g., pandas, numpy, Snowpark).
• Experience in a customer‑facing technical role (e.g., solutions architect, sales engineer, or professional services).
• Startup experience.

Snowflake is growing fast, and we’re scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth. We are looking for people who share our values, challenge ordinary thinking, and push the pace of innovation while building a future for themselves and Snowflake.

How do you want to make your impact?

For jobs located in the United States, please visit the job posting on the Snowflake Careers Site for salary and benefits information: careers.snowflake.com