Forward Deployed Engineer, Applied AI

Job Summary

At Snowflake, we are building a high-impact team to help the world's most innovative companies unlock the power of AI. As an Forward Deployed Engineer, Applied AI on our Cortex AI 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.

About the Role

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.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• 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.

Requirements

• 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.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance.
• 401(k) retirement plan.
• Flexible spending & health savings account.
• At least 12 paid holidays.
• Paid time off.
• Parental leave.
• Employee assistance program.
• Other company benefits.