Director of Engineering, Frontier Engineering
Posted 11 days ago
The role in short
Lead and scale a global team of Forward Deployed Engineers who embed with strategic customers to build and ship production AI systems on the Snowflake platform.
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.
Frontier Engineering is Snowflake's forward deployed engineering practice: senior engineers and engineering leaders who embed with our most strategic customers to build on the AI Data Cloud and turn ambitious ideas into production outcomes. As Director of Engineering, you will build and scale a world-class team of Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs). You will operate with executive presence in front of customers while staying close enough to the work to raise the engineering bar.
AS A DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING AT SNOWFLAKE, YOU WILL:
- Lead a sizeable, multi-country engineering organization
- Set the technical and operating vision for Frontier Engineering: how FDE teams scope, build, and ship on Snowflake capabilities such as Snowpark, Cortex AI, and Snowflake Horizon
- Serve as a senior customer-facing leader, partnering directly with customer executives to shape engineering engagements and earn trust as a hands-on technical leader, not only a relationship owner
- Attract and hire exceptional engineering talent, drawing on your own network to fill open roles, and coach and develop managers and senior engineers to build a durable, high-performing, engineering-first culture across multiple countries and time zones
- Partner with Sales, Product, and the global Frontier Engineering organization to connect customer needs to product direction and real engineering outcomes
OUR IDEAL DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING WILL HAVE:
- 12+ years of software engineering experience with significant time leading engineering teams, including managing managers
- A genuine engineering foundation: you have built and shipped production software and can set a high technical bar and oversee delivery
- Proven experience building or scaling Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) style teams, or embedded engineering teams that build directly with and for customers
- Strong customer-facing executive presence, with a track record of working directly with customer executives and winning technical credibility
- Experience leading engineering organizations across multiple countries and time zones, ideally across APJ
- Demonstrated ability to attract senior engineering talent through an established network
- Comfort with ambiguity and organizational change: you have reshaped, consolidated, or transformed teams and defined structure where none existed
- Experience with cloud data platforms, AI/ML, or modern data and application development
BONUS POINTS FOR THE FOLLOWING:
- Hands-on familiarity with Snowflake or comparable cloud data and AI platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP, Databricks)
- Experience building with GenAI and agentic application patterns in production
WHY JOIN OUR TEAM AT SNOWFLAKE?
Frontier Engineering sits at the leading edge of how customers adopt the AI Data Cloud, pairing deep engineering talent with the most strategic accounts. This is a rare opportunity to shape a new engineering-first practice from a position of real ownership: you will define the organization, build the team, and set the bar for how Snowflake engineers alongside its customers. You will have the backing of a global Frontier Engineering organization and the mandate to build something lasting.
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
Prep for this interview
3 questions likely to come up at Snowflake, each matched to a line in this posting.
- 1Cloud, deployment and security
They wrote: “Hands-on familiarity with Snowflake or comparable cloud data and AI platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP, Databricks)”
How would you debug a deployment that works in staging but fails at the customer's site?
How to answer
Why they ask: Customer environments differ in ways you can't see. This tests method under pressure.
- Compare versions, config and environment variables
- Check network rules, proxies and certificates (common in enterprise)
- Look at resource limits and permissions
- Add the missing check to your install steps afterwards
Tip: List the usual suspects and how you'd check each without full access.
- 2LLMs, RAG and agents
They wrote: “Experience building with GenAI and agentic application patterns in production”
When would you use an agent that takes actions, and how do you keep it safe?
How to answer
Why they ask: Agent work is growing fast in FDE postings. Senior candidates are expected to know where agents fail.
- Use agents for multi-step tasks with clear success checks; avoid them where one wrong action is costly
- Give the agent narrow tools and permissions, not broad access
- Require human approval for risky actions
- Log every step so the customer can audit it
Tip: Start from the cost of a wrong action. Limit what the agent can do, and log everything.
- 3Ownership and working with customers
They wrote: “Comfort with ambiguity and organizational change: you have reshaped, consolidated, or transformed teams and defined structure where none existed”
Tell me about a project where the requirements kept changing. What did you do?
How to answer
Why they ask: Ambiguity is the norm. They want proof you can keep moving without a clear spec.
- The project and why requirements kept moving
- What you did to pin them down (short demos, written decisions)
- The trade-offs you made to keep shipping
- The result, with a number if you have one
Tip: Show how you reduced the change, beyond how you coped with it.
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