Director of Engineering, Frontier Engineering

About the role

Snowflake's Frontier Engineering is a forward-deployed engineering practice of senior engineers and engineering leaders who embed with strategic customers to build on the AI Data Cloud. As Director of Engineering, you will build and scale a world-class team of Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs), operate with executive presence in front of customers and stay close enough to the work to raise the engineering bar.

Key responsibilities

• Lead a sizeable, multi-country engineering organization.
• Set the technical and operating vision for Frontier Engineering, covering how FDE teams scope, build and ship on Snowflake capabilities such as Snowpark, Cortex AI and Snowflake Horizon.
• Act as a senior customer-facing leader, partnering directly with customer executives to shape engineering engagements and earn trust as a hands-on technical leader.
• Attract and hire engineering talent, draw on your own network to fill open roles, and coach and develop managers and senior engineers across multiple countries and time zones.
• Partner with Sales, Product and the global Frontier Engineering organization to connect customer needs to product direction and engineering outcomes.

Required profile

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including significant time leading engineering teams and managing managers.
• Genuine engineering foundation: built and shipped production software and able to set a high technical bar.
• Proven experience building or scaling Forward Deployed Engineer-style or embedded engineering teams that build directly with customers.
• Customer-facing executive presence and track record of working with customer executives.
• 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, having reshaped, consolidated or transformed teams.

Required skills

• Experience with cloud data platforms, AI/ML, or modern data and application development.
• Bonus: hands-on familiarity with Snowflake or comparable platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP, Databricks).
• Bonus: experience building with GenAI and agentic application patterns in production.

Jobs located in the United States are listed on the Snowflake Careers site, which also provides salary and benefits information.