Staff Research Scientist, AI Agents & LLMs
- Salary
- $200K - $287.5K
- Level
- Staff
- Work type
- Hybrid · Bellevue
Not stated in the posting: visa.
Open. First seen 9 September 2026.
About the role
Snowflake's standard text
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.
THE MISSION
We are seeking a Staff Research Scientist to serve as a technical pillar within our AI research organization. You will not just execute on roadmaps—you will define them.
At the intersection of autonomous agents and large language models (LLMs), you will build the models and systems that turn enterprise data into self-directed, decision-making agents—shifting from passive data access to autonomous execution.
Our team operates at the frontier of enterprise AI, delivering both state-of-the-art models and production systems, including:
- Arctic LLM: Enterprise foundation models optimized for performance and efficiency
- Arctic-Text2SQL: Post-trained reasoning models with frontier-level quality at a fraction of cost and latency
- Snowflake Intelligence: Brought research to production through agentic innovations in multi-step reasoning, Deep Research for structured and unstructured insights, and system optimization
- Arctic Inference: High-performance LLM serving stack (Shift Parallelism, SwiftKV), open-sourced and powering Snowflake Cortex
- Arctic Long-Context Training: Enables 1M+ token context training on a single H200 GPU
- Agent World Models (AWM): RL training across 1,000+ synthetic environments for tool-using agents
We focus on core challenges such as reliable reasoning, long-horizon planning, grounded generation, and scalable model and agent development.
IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL:
- Define research direction in Agentic AI and LLMs
- Develop models: train, fine-tune, and align models for enterprise reasoning and tool use
- Advance autonomous agents: drive state-of-the-art capabilities in multi-step reasoning and tool use
- Advance the stack: retrieval, grounding, memory, and multi-agent coordination
- Establish evaluation standards for reliability, safety, and efficiency
- Drive research breakthroughs into production within Snowflake’s platform
- Mentor and lead to amplify the team’s technical impact
- Contribute to the field through publications and open source
WE’RE LOOKING FOR:
- Ph.D. in Computer Science or a related field with a strong publication record
- Expertise in LLM development (training, fine-tuning, alignment, or post-training)
- Experience with agentic systems (multi-agent systems, tool use, or agent optimization)
- Strong systems thinking under real-world constraints (latency, cost, reliability)
- Proven technical leadership and end-to-end ownership
- Ability to translate research into impactful systems
WHY SNOWFLAKE?
Frontier AI, Full Stack
Work across the full stack—from foundation models (Arctic LLM, Arctic Text2SQL) to agent systems (Snowflake Intelligence) and inference/training infrastructure (Arctic Inference, Arctic Training).
State-of-the-Art, Real Impact
Drive cutting-edge research that ships—powered by massive enterprise data and production workloads.
Hard, Meaningful Problems
Build autonomous systems for reliable reasoning over enterprise data—where correctness, cost, and latency all matter.
Open Research Culture
Publish, open-source, and help shape the field.
Snowflake is growing fast, and we are scaling our team to accelerate AI innovation.
Are you ready to build the brain for the Enterprise Data Cloud?
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 plan as an essential part of their duties. It is every employee's duty to keep customer information secure and confidential.
Snowflake's standard text
Snowflake is growing fast, and we’re scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth. We are looking for people who share our values, challenge ordinary thinking, and push the pace of innovation while building a future for themselves and Snowflake.
How do you want to make your impact?
For jobs located in the United States, please visit the job posting on the Snowflake Careers Site for salary and benefits information: careers.snowflake.com
What this role asks for
Standard for data science / ML roles
LLM
Common in data science / ML postings at any company.
76% of this description is written for the role. The rest is Snowflake's standard text, folded away below.
Read against Snowflake's other open postings on this site.
The team: Engineering HIRES STEADILY
This role is one of 109 open in Engineering. 44 were posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in January: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.
WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS
Snowflake (109 of 109), Java (55 of 109), Python (51 of 109), AWS (45 of 109), Azure (45 of 109), GCP (44 of 109), Golang (42 of 109)
OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM
- Senior Principal Forward Deployed Engineer, Frontier Engineering posted Oct 16
- Incident Response Engineer posted Oct 16
- Staff Software Engineer — Engineering Systems, Continuous Integration posted Oct 16
- Software Engineer — Engineering Systems, Continuous Integration posted Oct 15
- Principal Forward Deployed Engineer I, Frontier Engineering posted Oct 15
- Senior Software Engineer - Identity, Data Security and Trust posted Oct 15
- Principal Software Engineer, Anti-Abuse posted Oct 15
- Staff Software Engineer - Ingestion posted Oct 13
- Software Engineer Observe Team posted Oct 13
- AI Software Engineer posted Oct 13
- Technical Program Manager posted Oct 12
- Engineering Manager - Snowpark posted Oct 12
- Software Engineer Intern - Zurich (2026) posted Oct 12
- Senior Technical Program Manager - ML/AI posted Oct 10
- Director of Engineering - Traffic & Networking posted Oct 8
- Principal Software Engineer - Elastic Global Services posted Oct 8
- Senior Software Engineer, Enterprise posted Oct 7
- Senior Software Engineer posted Oct 6
- Engineering Manager, Release Validation posted Oct 6
- Tech Lead/Manager, AI-Native Authoring posted Oct 6
- Principal Software Engineer 2 - OLTP posted Oct 6
- Staff Technical Program Manager - AppEx posted Oct 6
- Senior Technical Program Manager - Capacity Planning posted Oct 5
- Senior Manager - AI for Engineering Systems posted Oct 5
- Senior Director of Engineering – Horizon Catalog, Collaboration & Marketplace posted Oct 3
- Software Engineer AI Team posted Oct 1
- Software Engineer – Mobile Team posted Sep 30
- Senior Software Engineer - Cloud Provisioning Service posted Sep 30
- Staff Software Engineer posted Sep 30
- Frontend Software Engineer– Cortex AI Apps posted Sep 29
- Software Engineer - SnowConvert AI posted Sep 29
- Software Engineer Intern - Berlin (2027) posted Sep 29
- Principal Software Engineer II - Interoperable Foundations posted Sep 28
- Staff Software Engineer - Postgres Control Plane posted Sep 26
- Software Engineer - Postgres posted Sep 25
- Technical Program Manager - Security posted Sep 25
- Software Engineer - Java Platform posted Sep 25
- Staff Software Engineer, Frontier Security Team posted Sep 25
- SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER posted Sep 24
- Staff Applied AI Engineer (FDE) posted Sep 24
- Principal Software Engineer - Agentic Pipelines posted Sep 23
- Senior Software Engineer - Cortex AI Infrastructure posted Sep 23
- Senior Software Engineer - Foundation DB posted Sep 22
- Senior/Staff System Research Engineer – LLM Inference Optimization posted Sep 21
- Senior Software Engineer - Billing Platform posted Sep 18
- Principal Frontend AI Engineer - Cortex Code posted Sep 18
- Engineering Manager - Cloud Efficiency posted Sep 18
- Staff Software Engineer, Frontier Security Team posted Sep 18
- Staff Software Engineer, Cortex AI Search Infrastructure posted Sep 17
- Intermediate/ Senior Software Engineer - Cortex LLM Training Platform posted Sep 17
- Principal Software Engineer - Performance Engineering (Cloud Infrastructure) posted Sep 17
- Staff Software Engineer - Snowflake Feature Store posted Sep 15
- Fullstack Engineer - Marketplace posted Sep 15
- Senior Software Engineer - Security Foundations posted Sep 11
- Director of Engineering, AI Functions posted Sep 11
- Engineering Manager posted Sep 10
- AI Research Scientist, New Grad – Agents & Reinforcement Learning posted Sep 3
- Senior Software Engineer - Cloud Efficiency posted Sep 3
- Senior Software Engineer - Cloud Security posted Sep 2
- Staff Software Engineer - Query Processing (Snowtrail) posted Sep 1
- Senior Software Engineer, Cortex Quality posted Aug 31
- Senior Software Engineer - ManagedDB posted Aug 31
- Senior Software Engineer - Dynamic Tables posted Aug 30
- Software Engineer - Dynamic Tables posted Aug 30
- Staff Software Engineer - Snowhouse posted Aug 27
- Staff Software Engineer, Snowpark Container Service posted Aug 24
- Engineering Manager - Cost Intelligence posted Aug 24
- Senior Fullstack Engineer - Marketplace posted Aug 21
- Senior Software Engineer - Capacity posted Aug 21
- Platform Infrastructure Engineer posted Aug 20
- Staff/Principal AI Software Engineer - Snowflake CoWork posted Aug 19
- Principal Data Platform Architect posted Aug 18
- Senior Engineering Manager - OLTP posted Aug 15
- Senior Software Engineer - NatSec posted Aug 15
- Software Engineer - AIM Virtualization posted Aug 14
- Staff Frontend Software Engineer, AI Product: Observe by Snowflake posted Aug 10
- Software Engineer, Applied AI posted Jul 30
- Software Engineer - Database Engineering posted Jul 28
- Principal Software Engineer posted Jul 28
- Post-Doctoral AI Researcher (2 year Fixed-Term) posted Jul 24
- Software Engineer - SnowCommand posted Jul 23
- Engineering Manager, Data Engineering Experience posted Jul 21
- Staff Software Engineer - AI Products posted Jul 20
- Senior Software Engineer, Data Transformation posted Jul 17
- Senior Software Engineer, Snowpark Container Service posted Jul 14
- Senior Full Stack Engineer, App Runtime posted Jul 14
- Forward Deployed Engineer, Applied AI posted Jul 10
- Software Engineer, AI Native Authoring posted Jul 7
- Lead Forward Deployed Engineer - Migration posted Jul 2
- Senior Software Engineer - Identity & Access Management posted Jul 1
- Staff Software Engineer - FDB Platform posted Jun 30
- Staff Software Engineer - Database Engineering posted Jun 29
- Staff Software Engineer - Unistore posted Jun 25
- Senior Software Engineer - Product Security - Poland posted Jun 25
- Principal Engineer posted Jun 8
- Software Engineer Intern - Berlin (2026) posted Jun 2
- Software Engineer (AI-Native), Database Engineering posted May 27
- Engineering Manager, Bedrock posted May 22
- Senior Software Engineer - Observe by Snowflake, OpenTelemetry posted May 8
- Senior Frontend Engineer, AI Product - Observe by Snowflake posted Apr 29
- Principal Software Engineer - AI Poland posted Apr 7
- Senior Forward Deployed Engineer -Spark posted Apr 1
- Principal Software Engineer II - Next-Gen Data Transformations posted Apr 1
- Principal Software Engineer II - Product Security posted Mar 9
- Staff Software Engineer, App Runtime posted Mar 4
- Principal Software Engineer I - Snowhouse Foundation posted Feb 26
- Software Engineer - Backend posted Feb 6
- Senior Technical Program Manager posted Jan 21
From the team and dates on Snowflake's own job board.
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