Principal Data Platform Engineer - AI & Data Lakehouse

Salesforce

San Francisco (CA)

On-site

USD 250,000 - 320,000

Full time

5 days ago

Be an early applicant

Get more replies from employers

Send a job-specific resume in minutes.

Job summary

Salesforce's Developer Experience team seeks a Principal Data Platform Engineer in San Francisco to design and build backend services, data-platform automation, and AI agent systems powering our Snowflake-based lakehouse. You will help set technical direction and ensure reliability while mentoring the team and expanding tooling and APIs.

You will extend CI/CD pipelines, IAM security, and observability to enable scalable data products and AI-enabled workflows across the organization.

Qualifications

15+ years of experience designing, building, and operating production backend services at scale, with expert-level Python, Go, or Java.
Hands-on experience building and deploying production AI/LLM applications, including RAG pipelines and tool-calling agents - not just research or prototypes.
Deep experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS), infrastructure as code, and CI/CD pipelines for containerized services.
Strong knowledge of identity and security practices, including OAuth/OIDC, least-privilege access, and multi-tenant isolation.
A related technical degree required.

Responsibilities

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.