Senior Software Engineer - Cortex AI - FDE
Application analysis
Senior Software Engineer - Cortex AI - FDE at Snowflake is a forward deployed cloud data warehouse role for engineers who want customer-facing technical work with real deployment ownership.
Reading this role
This Forward Deployed Engineer role centers on embedded customer delivery — discovery, prototyping, integration, and production rollout. Key signals from the listing: Senior scope.
About Snowflake
Snowflake field engineers drive warehouse migrations and analytics modernization with enterprise buyers. The role is anchored in US-CA-Menlo Park, so expect on-site customer work in that region.
Signals in the listing
Stand out for Senior Software Engineer - Cortex AI - FDE
- Lead your application with one paragraph tying Senior Software Engineer - Cortex AI - FDE to a specific customer or deployment you owned — Snowflake hires for shipped outcomes, not tool lists.
- Prepare a 5-minute “week one on site” plan: who you would meet, what you would inspect in their stack, and what artifact you would deliver by day five.
- Show you can go from discovery notes → working integration → production checklist without needing a large internal team.
- This role is tied to US-CA-Menlo Park — mention willingness to work on-site with customers and any existing ties to that market (clients, partners, or domain knowledge).
Stand out at Snowflake
- Demonstrate SQL/ELT patterns with a concrete example — Snowflake will probe for specifics, not buzzwords.
- Demonstrate cost governance with a concrete example — Snowflake will probe for specifics, not buzzwords.
- Proof of running a successful migration or cost-optimization project beats generic cloud buzzwords.
- Read recent engineering blog posts, product launches, and customer stories on snowflake.com — reference one explicitly in your outreach to show genuine interest.
Tailored from this listing’s title, company, and description. Always verify requirements on the company careers page before applying.
Role 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. The Cortex Apps team is building the future of AI for enterprise data. This role focuses on the backend infrastructure that powers our flagship products like Snowflake Intelligence, Cortex Agents and Search making agentic AI fast, reliable, scalable and secure at the enterprise level. You won’t just be using AI tools; you will be building the high-performance systems that orchestrate them. You’ll own and influence the architecture for agent execution environments, high-throughput context retrieval, or the ecosystem that allows our customers to iterate and launch agents in production. WHAT YOU WILL DO IN THIS ROLE: - Architect Agentic Runtimes: Build and scale the orchestration engines that execute complex agentic workflows, ensuring low-latency tool execution and robust state management. - Scale Context Engineering Infra: Design high-performance systems for RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), including vector database integration, scalable and efficient search indexing, query processing, and result ranking, semantic caching, and automated metadata extraction. - Build the "Evals Engine": Develop the automated infrastructure required to run massive-scale golden set simulations, error analysis pipelines, and "hillclimbing" experiments. - Productionize AI Workflows: Collabora