Staff AI Engineer - Cortex Code Quality

Snowflake5 days ago

Location

US-CA-Menlo Park

Type

Full Time

Salary

USD 236,000 – 339,200

Level

Staff

Role

Staff AI Engineer

Posted

Mar 24, 2026

Full TimeStaff

The role

Summary

Snowflake is seeking a Staff AI Engineer for their Cortex Code Quality team to architect and improve AI agent systems for enterprise-scale coding workflows. The ideal candidate will lead quality infrastructure, design experimental pipelines, and drive strategic improvements in AI agent performance and reliability.

What you'll do

Agent Strategy & Systems: Own major pillars of the quality stack, focusing on tuning agent behavior for next-generation agentic coding tasks.

Infrastructure Development: Design and evolve experimental pipelines and tooling to support large-scale experimentation, error mining, and workflow iteration with clear performance signals.

Quality Analysis: Lead postmortems on quality regressions, cluster failure modes, and translate findings into prioritized roadmaps for engineering and modeling teams.

Cross-functional Leadership: Align product, infrastructure, and applied AI teams on quality standards for critical customer workflows, and mentor engineers to elevate evaluation practices.

Production Reliability: Ensure quality systems are dependable with reproducible runs, stable datasets, robust versioning, and clear operational insights.

What we look for

Technical

Programming LanguagesProficiency in Python, TypeScript, and Go (strong in at least two languages)

AI/ML Production Experience8+ years of experience shipping AI/ML-backed software in production

Evaluation SystemsStrong track record building eval harnesses, measurement, and experimentation loops for LLM/agent systems

Education

Academic BackgroundBachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Statistics, or related field; Master's preferred but not required

Experience

Technical LeadershipStaff-level ownership of technical direction, cross-team delivery, and mentoring

Complex Pipeline ManagementExperience building and owning complex quality and data pipelines with substantial state and operational requirements

Skills

Required skills

AI System DesignAbility to architect robust AI agent systems with focus on efficiency, repeatability, and auditability

CommunicationExceptional communication skills including clear technical writing and cross-functional influence

Nice to have

Data Engineering ToolsExperience with dbt, Airflow, data modeling, and data analysis pipelines

AI Tool ExpertiseDeep understanding of agentic coding tools, IDE agents, and CLI agents

Compensation & benefits

Salary

USD 236,000 – 339,200 (annual)

Benefits

Competitive Compensation

Salary range of $236K - $339.2K with potential for equity and bonuses

Innovation Environment

Opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI and data technologies at a leading cloud computing company

Professional Growth

Mentorship opportunities and exposure to advanced AI engineering challenges

Interview process

1
Initial Screening — Phone or video call with recruiting team to discuss background and role fit
2
Technical Interview — In-depth technical discussion focusing on AI systems, evaluation methodologies, and production experience
3
System Design Challenge — Architectural design exercise demonstrating ability to create scalable AI quality infrastructure
4
Cross-functional Panel — Interview with team members from engineering, product, and AI modeling teams
5
Final Leadership Interview — Discussion with senior leadership about vision, approach, and potential impact