Principal AI Systems Engineer – Agent & Backend Lead

salesforce.com, inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 173,000 - 345,000; Full time

Job summary

Salesforce is seeking a Principal Engineer for Salesforce AI Labs to lead architecture and hands-on development of agent-based backend systems. You will design, implement, and operate scalable workflows combining AI reasoning with deterministic execution, while ensuring reliability and security in customer environments.

You will collaborate with customers and fellow engineers to shape the product, mentor others, and drive architectural decisions across multiple components.

Qualifications

• Led the architecture and delivery of complex backend systems through deployment and production improvements.
• Hands-on experience shipping and operating LLM-powered systems.
• Experience reasoning about concurrency, persistent state, retries and partial failures.

Responsibilities

• Design and build systems that learn from demonstrations and combine AI reasoning with deterministic execution to complete workflows reliably.
• Develop recovery and verification capabilities so agents can adapt to changes, confirm outcomes, and recognize when human intervention is needed.
• Build backend services with robust workflow state management, failure handling, and secure access to customer environments.
• Create evaluations and diagnostics that measure task success, expose regressions, and make failures understandable.
• Work alongside customers to understand their workflows, prototype solutions, and validate results in their environments.
• Investigate where automation succeeds or fails, then turn those findings into improvements to the core product.
• Help customers move from their first successful workflow toward repeatable, increasingly self‑service adoption.
• Partner with forward‑deployed engineers and product management to decide which customer needs should shape the roadmap.
• Lead architectural decisions across agent execution, backend services, and workflow state, aligning system boundaries and tradeoffs with other technical leads.
• Evaluate model selection, tool use, and context management against reliability, latency, and cost.
• Raise the engineering bar through hands‑on implementation, design reviews, and mentoring; help engineers take on broader ownership and participate in hiring.

Skills

Python

Go

Java

JavaScript/TypeScript

Job description

Salesforce is seeking a Principal Engineer for Salesforce AI Labs to lead architecture and hands-on development of agent-based backend systems. You will design, implement, and operate scalable workflows combining AI reasoning with deterministic execution, while ensuring reliability and security in customer environments.

You will collaborate with customers and fellow engineers to shape the product, mentor others, and drive architectural decisions across multiple components.