Principal AI Software Engineer - Snowflake Intelligence

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. ABOUT THE ROLE The Cortex Apps team is defining the future of AI for enterprise data. Our mission is to transform how the world’s largest enterprises interact with their data through flagship products like Snowflake Intelligence. As a Principal AI Engineer, you will be a technical North Star for our AI initiatives. You won't just execute on a roadmap; you will help define it. You will tackle the most complex, "frontier" problems in agentic reasoning, NL-to-SQL, and enterprise-scale RAG, ensuring our AI products are not only innovative but fundamentally reliable and scalable for the Fortune 500. WHAT YOU WILL DO IN THIS ROLE: - Technical Strategy & Architecture: Define the long-term technical vision for Snowflake Intelligence. Lead the architectural design of multi-agent systems, complex tool-use frameworks, and self-correcting NL-to-SQL engines. - Drive Industry-Leading Reliability: Move beyond simple evals to build world-class, automated "hill-climbing" infrastructure. You will establish the methodology for how Snowflake measures and guarantees LLM performance across diverse customer schemas. - Cross-Functional Influence: Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to align AI capabilities with business goals. You will bridge the gap between Research (modeling) and Production (infra), ensuring the latest LLM breakthroughs are viable at Snowflake scale. - Ecosystem Thinking: Design extensible "context engineering" patterns—including advanced function calling and semantic layer integration—that can be leveraged by other Snowflake teams and external developers. - Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Act as a force multiplier. You will mentor Staff and Senior engineers, lead cross-functional "strike teams" on high-stakes projects, and foster a culture of technical excellence and rapid experimentation. REQUIREMENTS: - Experience: 10+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years specifically leading the deployment of LLM-based applications at massive scale. - Education: Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Computer Science, AI, or a related field. - Expertise: Deep, "under-the-hood" understanding of LLM orchestration. You should be an expert in prompt optimization, semantic modeling, and building robust guardrails for non-deterministic systems. - Systems Thinking: Proven track record of designing complex systems that integrate AI with traditional data stacks (SQL, Retrieval Systems, Semantic Layers). - Communication: Exceptional ability to communicate complex technical trade-offs to both executive leadership and ICs. You are as comfortable in a design doc as you are in a boardroom. - Proven Impact: You have previously held a "Principal" or equivalent high-level IC role, or have led the technical launch of a major AI product used by millions. ABOUT SNOWFLAKE Snowflake is the AI Data Cloud. We aren't just shipping "wrappers"; we are building the foundational intelligence layer for the world’s data. Join us as we scale Cortex, including Snowflake Intelligence, Cortex Agents, Analyst, and Search—to define the next decade of enterprise computing. Every Snowflake employee is expected to follow the company’s confidentiality and security standards for handling sensitive data. Snowflake employees must abide by the company’s data security pl