Forward Deployed Engineer, Frontier Engineering
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- NZ-New Zealand-Remote
- Work setup
- Remote
- Seniority
- Not specified
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 3+ years
- Category
- Solutions engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 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.
Nice to have
- 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.
Full 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.