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.
Responsibilities
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; Build and scale a world-class team of Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs)
Requirements
12+ years of software engineering experience with significant time leading engineering teams, including managing managers; Genuine engineering foundation: 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: has reshaped, consolidated, or transformed teams and defined structure where none existed; Experience with cloud data platforms, AI/ML, or modern data and application development
Nice to have
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
Australia · The Rocks
