Principal Data Platform Engineer

Location: California - San Francisco

Remote Type: Office Tech-Flexible

Time Type: Full time

Job Description

To get the best candidate experience, please consider applying for a maximum of 3 roles within 12 months to ensure you are not duplicating efforts.

Job Category

Software Engineering

Job Details

About Salesforce

Salesforce is the #1 AI CRM, where humans with agents drive customer success together. Here, ambition meets action. Tech meets trust. And innovation isn’t a buzzword — it’s a way of life. The world of work as we know it is changing and we're looking for Trailblazers who are passionate about bettering business and the world through AI, driving innovation, and keeping Salesforce's core values at the heart of it all.

Ready to level-up your career at the company leading workforce transformation in the agentic era? You’re in the right place! Agentforce is the future of AI, and you are the future of Salesforce.

Summary

Design, build, and maintain the backend services, APIs, data-platform automation, and AI platform / agent systems behind our data products. This is a backend-heavy role: distributed Python services, streaming. LLM/agent runtimes on AWS, RAG pipelines, and the dbt/Airflow automation that powers a Snowflake-based lakehouse.

You will work inside the Developer Experience team, whose mandate is to build the tooling, "paved paths," and automation that let internal data teams ship discoverable, governed, and consumable data products quickly and safely.
 

About the platform you'll work on

• Lakehouse & warehouse — Snowflake with Apache Iceberg tables in a medallion architecture (Bronze → Silver → Gold → Semantic Views).

• Transformation — dbt (Cloud on Fusion) with data contracts, tag-driven governance, and automated project-evaluation checks.

• Orchestration — Airflow on AWS MWAA; DAGs and schedules authored and deployed through platform tooling and CI (metadata driven).

• Developer tooling — an internal CLI and reusable utilities (dbt, Iceberg operations, Snowflake load, REST API based ingestions, etc.) that abstract the platform for data teams.

• Data quality & governance — Monte Carlo for data observability (monitors as code) and centralized governance (tagging, lineage, PII classification, cataloging).

• AI layer — Agent/MCP/Skill deployment framework, RAG, semantic router / broker agents, over our data products and catalog metadata; conversational agents in Slack;
  model access via AWS Bedrock / AgentCore, centralized LLM Gateway, and Snowflake Cortex.

• Cloud & delivery — AWS (ECS Fargate, Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, S3, IAM, etc.), Terraform IaC, GitHub Actions CI/CD, containerized builds, structured logging, metrics, and tracing.

​Responsibilities

• Backend services

• Design, build, and maintain backend services in Python / Go to support our Data Platform Services — Agent runtimes on AWS Bedrock AgentCore / ECS Fargate, and event-driven Lambda handlers for our AI Platform Services

• Design and maintain our abstraction layers for for our data domain customers via custom developed utilities

• Maintain and service our infrastructure using IaC (Terraform) for our AWS accounts

• AI / agents

• Build RAG pipelines and tool-calling AI agents for our data products: retrieval, orchestration, grounding/citations, and evaluation.

• Integrate model providers with our LLM Gateway with response streaming, prompt caching, and structured outputs in an auditable way (OTeL)

• Stand up eval harnesses, guardrails, and tracing so agent quality, latency, and cost are measurable and regressions are caught before release.

• Data-platform automation

• Build and maintain data-platform automation: dbt services, MWAA/Airflow orchestration, and tooling that makes data products discoverable, governed, and consumable.

• Extend the platform CLI and shared utilities that data teams use as their day-to-day interface to the platform.

• Identity & security

• Implement auth and identity: OAuth/OIDC flows (per-user 3LO, token vaulting, session binding), least-privilege IAM, and secrets management.

• Enforce multi-tenant isolation and per-user identity/RBAC across services and agents.

• Reliability & delivery

• Own service reliability and delivery: Terraform, GitHub Actions CI/CD, container builds, structured logging, metrics/tracing, alerting, and cost controls.

• Set technical direction: system and API design, code review, and mentoring.

Required skills
 

Backend engineering

• 15+ years designing, building, and maintaining production backend services at scale

• Expert-level Python / Go / Java for server-side development; solid grasp of relevant frameworks and the WSGI/ASGI model.

• Service & API design: REST (and/or gRPC), request/response and streaming patterns, pagination, versioning, idempotency, and backward-compatible contracts.

• Data layer: SQL and data modeling, query optimization and indexing, transactions, connection pooling; relational, warehouse (Snowflake), and NoSQL/key-value (DynamoDB) stores.

• Server-side patterns: caching strategies, background jobs/workers, queues and event-driven processing, rate limiting, retries/backoff, and timeouts.

• Performance & reliability: profiling, load handling, latency/throughput trade-offs, graceful degradation, and designing for failure.

• Observability: structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing, and debugging live production issues.

Software engineering fundamentals

• OOP (required): encapsulation, abstraction, inheritance, composition, polymorphism; SOLID principles; design patterns applied pragmatically; strong domain modeling.

• Solid data structures & algorithms; ability to reason about time/space complexity.

• Concurrency & async programming (async/await, threading, event loops) and their failure modes.

• Testing (unit, integration, end-to-end) and testable design; Git and PR-based workflows; disciplined code review.

Cloud & infrastructure

• Production AWS: ECS/containers, Lambda, IAM, API Gateway, DynamoDB.

• Infrastructure as code with Terraform; CI/CD (GitHub Actions or equivalent) and container builds.

Distributed systems

• Building services that are horizontally scalable, resilient, and loosely coupled; handling consistency, retries, idempotency, and partial failure.

Security

• OAuth/OIDC, authn/authz, token handling, least-privilege access, multi-tenant isolation, secrets management.

AI / LLM engineering

• Building LLM applications in production (not research).

• RAG: chunking, embeddings, vector search, hybrid search, reranking, grounding/citations, context-window management, retrieval evaluation.

• Agents: prompt engineering, tool use/function calling, structured outputs, single- and multi-step orchestration, prompt caching.

• Integration with model providers — Anthropic/Claude, AWS Bedrock/AgentCore, Snowflake Cortex — and response streaming.

• AI quality & ops: eval harnesses, guardrails, tracing/observability, token/latency/cost optimization.

• AI security: prompt injection, data exfiltration, PII handling, per-user identity/RBAC enforcement.

Nice to have

• dbt, Airflow/MWAA, Snowflake hands-on experience.

• MCP (Model Context Protocol) and/or applied RAG.

• Slack platform (Bolt, Socket Mode, Block Kit) or other real-time/conversational backends.

• Data observability (Monte Carlo) or data-quality/governance tooling.

• Fine-tuning/adaptation, semantic caching, or model routing/fallback.

• Experience adding AI capabilities to existing production systems.

• Iceberg / open table formats and lakehouse patterns.

• Tableau or other BI integration.

Unleash Your Potential

When you join Salesforce, you’ll be limitless in all areas of your life. Our benefits and resources support you to find balance and be your best, and our AI agents accelerate your impact so you can do your best. Together, we’ll bring the power of Agentforce to organizations of all sizes and deliver amazing experiences that customers love. Apply today to not only shape the future — but to redefine what’s possible — for yourself, for AI, and the world.

Accommodations

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Posting Statement

Salesforce is an equal opportunity employer and maintains a policy of non-discrimination with all employees and applicants for employment. What does that mean exactly? It means that at Salesforce, we believe in equality for all. And we believe we can lead the path to equality in part by creating a workplace that’s inclusive, and free from discrimination. Know your rights: workplace discrimination is illegal. Any employee or potential employee will be assessed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications – without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression or identity, transgender status, age, disability, veteran or marital status, political viewpoint, or other classifications protected by law. This policy applies to current and prospective employees, no matter where they are in their Salesforce employment journey. It also applies to recruiting, hiring, job assignment, compensation, promotion, benefits, training, assessment of job performance, discipline, termination, and everything in between. Recruiting, hiring, and promotion decisions at Salesforce are fair and based on merit. The same goes for compensation, benefits, promotions, transfers, reduction in workforce, recall, training, and education.

In the United States, compensation offered will be determined by factors such as location, job level, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Certain roles may be eligible for incentive compensation, equity, and benefits. Salesforce offers a variety of benefits to help you live well including: time off programs, medical, dental, vision, mental health support, paid parental leave, life and disability insurance, 401(k), and an employee stock purchasing program. More details about company benefits can be found at the following link: https://www.salesforcebenefits.com.Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring, Salesforce will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

At Salesforce, we believe in equitable compensation practices that reflect the dynamic nature of labor markets across various regions. The typical base salary range for this position is $197,300 - $313,700 annually. In select cities within the San Francisco and New York City metropolitan area, the base salary range for this role is $237,700 - $344,700 annually. The range represents base salary only, and does not include company bonus, incentive for sales roles, equity or benefits, as applicable.