Forward Deployed Engineer, Frontier Engineering
Snowflake is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer, Frontier Engineering for a remote role open to applicants in New Zealand. Level rates it ; you can apply on Snowflake.
Level's read on this job
- Builds AI ●●●● is how Level rates this forward deployed engineer role: the job is building AI systems.
- This is listed as a remote role.
- The posting mentions Python, SQL and Snowpark among its tools and skills.
- Snowflake has 351 other open roles on Level.
- Posted in the last few days.
AI in this role
Forward Deployed Engineer building production-grade enterprise AI systems, custom agents, and LLM applications using Snowflake technologies.
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
How we rate this
Forward Deployed Engineer, Frontier Engineering at Snowflake rates 90 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Also common in forward deployed engineer jobs at this level
Pay
- Typical forward deployed engineer job
- $182k
This posting doesn't list pay. Use the typical forward deployed engineer figure when pay comes up. See forward deployed engineer jobs
Questions you could be asked
- How would you design a retrieval step so the model answers from real data instead of guessing?
- How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
- How do you monitor a model once it's live, and how do you know it needs retraining?
- Tell me about a project where machine learning was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where llm was part of your work. What did you do?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: RAG, AI agents, ML Ops, Machine learning, and LLM. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.
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