# Staff AI Engineer - Cortex Code Quality

**Company:** [Snowflake](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/snowflake)
**Location:** Menlo Park, CA
**Role:** ML Engineering
**Salary:** $236k – $339k/yr
**Experience:** 8+ years
**Skills:** Python, TypeScript, Go, LLMs, AI/ML, dbt, Airflow, RAG, Eval Harnesses, Experimentation Pipelines
**Posted:** 2026-03-24

> Staff AI Engineer builds and owns quality systems for Cortex Code AI coding agents, including agent strategy, experimentation pipelines, failure analysis, and cross-team alignment. Requires 8+ years shipping AI/ML software, proficiency in Python/TypeScript/Go, and expertise in LLM evaluation harnesses.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Own major pillars of the quality stack: tuning agent behavior to engage on next generation agentic coding tasks.
- Design and evolve pipelines and tooling that support large-scale experimentation, error mining, and iteration on prompts/tools/workflows with clear before/after signals.
- Lead postmortems on quality regressions; cluster failure modes; translate findings into a prioritized roadmap for engineering and modeling partners.
- Align product, infra, and applied AI on what “good” means for critical customer workflows; mentor engineers and uplevel eval craft across the team.
- Ensure quality systems are dependable in practice—reproducible runs, stable datasets, versioning, and operational clarity when things drift.

## Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Statistics, or a related field. Master’s or higher preferred but not a requirement.
- 8+ years of experience shipping AI/ML-backed software in production, including Staff-level ownership of technical direction, cross-team delivery, and mentoring.
- Strong track record building and operating eval harnesses, measurement, and/or experimentation loops for LLM/agent systems—not only one-off benchmarks.
- Proficiency in programming languages such as **Python**, **TypeScript**, **Go** (strong in at least two).
- Exceptional communication skills: crisp writeups, constructive debate, and ability to influence without authority across engineering and product.

## Nice to Haves
- Experience with data engineering pipelines (**dbt**, **Airflow**), data modeling, data analysis, retrieval systems, and semantic layers.
- Deep experience with agentic coding tools (IDE agents, CLI agents) and intuition for model strengths, failure modes, and prompting limits.
- Background in data engineering (**dbt**, **Airflow**), analytics, retrieval / RAG, or semantic layers.
- Prior work on LLM observability, safety/guardrails, or quality systems used as release gates in production.

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