Principal Data Platform Engineer

Description The Experience

The Developer Experience team builds the tooling, paved paths, and automation that let Salesforce's data teams ship discoverable, governed, and consumable data products quickly and safely. As our Principal Data Platform Engineer, based in San Francisco, you'll design and build the backend services, data-platform automation, and AI agent systems that power our Snowflake-based lakehouse — setting technical direction for how the rest of the org builds on top of it.

What You'll Actually Be Doing

• Design and build backend services and event-driven systems that support our data platform, including AI agent runtimes and API integrations.

• Build retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and tool-calling AI agents that make our data products and catalog easier to discover, query, and trust.

• Extend the platform's automation, command-line tooling, and shared utilities that data teams rely on as their day-to-day interface to the platform.

• Set technical direction through system and API design, code review, and mentoring, while owning service reliability, delivery, and cost efficiency.

You're Our Person If...

• You have 15+ years of experience designing, building, and operating production backend services at scale, with expert-level Python, Go, or Java.

• You have hands-on experience building and deploying production AI/LLM applications, including RAG pipelines and tool-calling agents — not just research or prototypes.

• You have deep experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS), infrastructure as code, and CI/CD pipelines for containerized services.

• You have strong knowledge of identity and security practices, including OAuth/OIDC, least-privilege access, and multi-tenant isolation.

• A related technical degree required.

Even Better If...

• You have hands-on experience with dbt, Airflow, Snowflake, or Iceberg-based lakehouse architectures.

• You've worked with Model Context Protocol (MCP) or built conversational/agentic tools on a platform like Slack.

• You have experience layering AI capabilities into existing production systems.

• You have experience with data observability or data-quality/governance tooling.

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. 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.