Principal Software Engineer - Backend Infrastructure and Distributed Systems

Principal Software Engineer (PMTS) - Backend - Infrastructure - Distributed Systems

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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.

About Salesforce

We’re Salesforce, the Customer Company, inspiring the future of business with AI+ Data +CRM. Leading with our core values, we help companies across every industry blaze new trails and connect with customers in a whole new way. And, we empower you to be a Trailblazer, too — driving your performance and career growth, charting new paths, and improving the state of the world. If you believe in business as the greatest platform for change and in companies doing well and doing good– you’ve come to the right place.

Role Description

Salesforce is seeking a Principal Engineer (PMTS) to design and operate the foundational public cloud governance and infrastructure platform that secures and enables Salesforce’s trusted CRM and enterprise cloud ecosystem.

Our Public Cloud engineering teams build and maintain large-scale distributed systems that underpin Salesforce products used by tens of millions of users worldwide. These systems form the secure control plane governing thousands of cloud accounts across multiple public cloud providers. They must be highly reliable, performant, and secure while preserving customer customizations and compliance requirements at global scale.

In this role, you will architect and optimize critical backend systems protecting Salesforce’s global cloud infrastructure. You will apply deep expertise in concurrency, distributed systems, and large-scale data management to build highly available, fault-tolerant, and secure-by-default services. These Tier-0/Tier-1 systems directly impact platform stability and security.

As a Principal Engineer, you will set technical direction while remaining hands-on — leading design and code reviews, building targeted prototypes to validate architecture, mentoring engineers, and acting as a technical escalation point for complex production challenges.

This role demands strong ownership, operational discipline, and enterprise-scale accountability in a Public Cloud-native environment.

Your Impact

As a Backend Principal Engineer, your job responsibilities will include:

• Design and evolve distributed control-plane systems governing public cloud environments at enterprise scale.

• Build automation frameworks, validation platforms, and policy enforcement engines across AWS, GCP, and Hyperforce.

• Develop secure Infrastructure-as-Code solutions for multi-cloud provisioning and guardrails.

• Make architectural decisions grounded in performance, scalability, availability, and blast-radius control.

• Design, develop, debug, and operate resilient services running across multiple regions and thousands of compute nodes.

• Optimize concurrency, workload distribution, and data management at scale.

• Ensure high availability, fault tolerance, and performance under heavy production traffic.

• Lead from the front — proactively dive into complex production code, build targeted PoCs, and validate architectural decisions through hands-on experimentation.

• Demonstrate strong bias for action by converting ambiguous ideas into working implementations to de-risk high-impact initiatives early.

• Mentor engineers across levels, strengthening system design thinking and operational discipline.

• Establish and enforce engineering standards for observability, automation, testing, and resilience.

• Act as the technical escalation point for complex architectural and production challenges.

• Own and operate multiple instances of mission-critical Tier-0/Tier-1 services.

• Balance live-site management, feature velocity, and retirement of technical debt.

• Lead post-incident reviews and drive systemic reliability improvements.

• Participate in on-call rotations to address complex issues in real time and maintain service availability

Required Skills:

• Mastery of multiple programming languages and platforms;

• 12-15+ years of software development experience;

• Strong experience with: Public cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform), Kubernetes-based microservices

• Deep understanding and experience in working on distributed systems

• Deep understanding of Services Oriented Architecture

• Deep knowledge of object-oriented programming and other scripting languages: Java, Python, Go, and Node.JS

• Excellent RDBMS concepts and developed applications on top of SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL

• Strong understanding of: Monitoring, alerting, logging, observability, CI/CD pipelines and automated validation, High availability design patterns

• Experience working in Agile environments with strong testing discipline.

• A deeper understanding of software development best practices and demonstrating leadership skills;

• Degree or equivalent relevant experience required. Experience will be evaluated based on the core competencies for the role (e.g. extracurricular leadership roles, military experience, volunteer roles, work experience, etc.)

Preferred Skills:

• Experience with Security, IAM, cloud governance, or policy frameworks

• Exposure to security protocols (mTLS, PKI, OAuth, SAML).

• Experience building control-plane or platform-level services

• Familiarity with distributed data stores and streaming systems.

• NoSQL, HBase and/or document store such as Elastic Search

• Experience with open source projects such as Kafka, Spark, or Zookeeper

• Knowledge/Contribution to open source technology

• Developing RESTful services.

• Experience with distributed caching and load balancing systems

BENEFITS & PERKS

• Comprehensive benefits package including well-being reimbursement, generous parental leave, adoption assistance, fertility benefits, and more!

• World-class enablement and on-demand training with Trailhead.com

• Exposure to executive thought leaders and regular 1:1 coaching with leadership

• Volunteer opportunities and participation in our 1:1:1 model for giving back to the community

• For more details, visit https://www.salesforcebenefits.com/

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

If you need a reasonable accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please submit a request via this Accommodations Request Form.

Please note that Salesforce uses artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help our recruiters assess and evaluate candidates’ resumes and qualifications throughout the recruiting process. Humans will always make any candidate selection and hiring decisions. Please see our Candidate Privacy Statement for more information about how we use your personal data and your rights, including with regard to use of AI tools and opt out options.

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.

Experience Level

Senior Level