Senior AI Forward‑Deployed Engineer

Snowflake; Bellevue (WA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 263,000; Full time

Job summary

Snowflake is building a high-impact team to help the world's most innovative companies unlock the power of AI. As a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, Applied AI on our Cortex AI team, you will own end-to-end delivery of enterprise AI programs, leading a team of 2-4 engineers while staying deeply technical yourself.

You will set the technical direction for your customer engagements, mentor your team, and serve as the senior technical voice at the intersection of product, engineering, and customer

Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience leading technical projects or teams, including setting technical direction, reviewing others' work, and driving delivery to completion.
• Proven experience building and productionizing applications using LLMs, especially with technologies like RAG and agentic workflows.
• Hands-on experience defining quality metrics and evaluation frameworks for LLM or agent systems, and using evals to systematically improve quality over time.
• Excellent problem-solving and communication skills, with an ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and executive stakeholders.
• Comfort with ambiguity and the ability to independently structure and execute on complex, open-ended problems.
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Experience in a customer-facing technical role.
• Willingness to travel.

Responsibilities

• Lead Customer Programs: Own the full lifecycle of complex, multi-engineer AI engagements - from scoping and architecture through deployment, monitoring, and handoff.
• Own AI Quality: Define what 'good' means for each engagement, set metrics and evaluation frameworks, and improve quality over time.
• Grow and Mentor Engineers: Provide day-to-day technical leadership and mentorship to a team of Applied AI Engineers.
• Deliver with Velocity: Design, iterate, and ship high-quality ML pipelines and agentic AI solutions with your team.
• Productionize AI at Scale: Own the full implementation lifecycle from prototype to deployment in large-scale production environments.
• Be a Strategic Technical Advisor: Advise data science and engineering leadership on Snowflake AI deployment.
• Collaborate to Innovate: Work with Product and Engineering to shape the AI platform's future.
• Drive Compounding Outcomes: Create reusable assets from deployments to scale impact.
• Have the opportunity to travel: Spend at least 25% onsite with strategic customers.

Skills

Technical leadership

LLMs & RAG

Quality metrics

Customer-facing

Travel willingness

Software engineering

Tools

Braintrust

LangSmith

Arize

Weave

Promptfoo

Job description

Snowflake is building a high-impact team to help the world's most innovative companies unlock the power of AI. As a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, Applied AI on our Cortex AI team, you will own end-to-end delivery of enterprise AI programs, leading a team of 2-4 engineers while staying deeply technical yourself.

You will set the technical direction for your customer engagements, mentor your team, and serve as the senior technical voice at the intersection of product, engineering, and customer