Lead Data Platform Engineer — AI & RAG Pipelines

Salesforce, Inc.; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 197,000 - 314,000; Full time

Job summary

Salesforce seeks a Principal Data Platform Engineer in San Francisco to design and build backend services powering a Snowflake-based lakehouse. You will shape data-platform automation, AI agent systems, and API integrations, guiding the team with strong security and reliability practices.

You’ll lead the development of RAG pipelines, tool-calling agents, and platform tooling while mentoring others and driving cost efficiency in a scalable cloud enviroment.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience designing, building, and operating production backend services at scale with Python/Go/Java.
• Hands-on experience deploying production AI/LLM applications, including RAG pipelines and tool-calling agents.
• Deep experience with AWS, infrastructure as code, and CI/CD for containerized services.
• Strong knowledge of identity and security practices (OAuth/OIDC, least-privilege, multi-tenant isolation).
• A related technical degree is required.

Responsibilities

• Design and build backend services and event-driven systems for the data platform, including AI agent runtimes and API integrations.
• Develop retrieval-augmented generation pipelines and tool-calling AI agents to improve discoverability and trust in data products.
• Extend automation, CLI tooling, and shared utilities used by data teams as the primary interface to the platform.
• Set technical direction through system and API design, code reviews, mentoring, and ensuring reliability, delivery, and cost efficiency.

Skills

Backend design

Python

Go

Java

AWS

CI/CD

Security

RAG pipelines

AI agents

Education

Related technical degree

Tools

dbt

Airflow

Snowflake

Iceberg

Slack

MCP

Job description

Salesforce seeks a Principal Data Platform Engineer in San Francisco to design and build backend services powering a Snowflake-based lakehouse. You will shape data-platform automation, AI agent systems, and API integrations, guiding the team with strong security and reliability practices.

You’ll lead the development of RAG pipelines, tool-calling agents, and platform tooling while mentoring others and driving cost efficiency in a scalable cloud enviroment.