Senior backend Engineer - Java

100 Salesforce, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 149,000 - 224,000; Full time

Job summary

Salesforce is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to help build agentic experiences for product setup and configuration. You will design a core agent framework, contribute to a growing skills ecosystem, and develop evaluation infrastructure to keep agent behavior trustworthy at scale.

The role is based in San Francisco and involves building intelligent systems that automate repetitive tasks, elevate strategy, and power better decisions with AI.

Qualifications

• 6+ years experience designing and building large scale, distributed backend systems.
• Experience with API design, versioning, and building systems that many teams can build on top of.
• Strong skills in at least one modern programming language and experience shipping production code.

Responsibilities

• Design and build a core agent framework that hosts many specialized capabilities, orchestrates sub tasks reliably, and integrates seamlessly into human workflows.
• Define the contract for reusable agent skills, focusing on API design, versioning, and composability so many teams can build and contribute consistently.
• Build evaluation infrastructure that measures agent quality even when outputs are non deterministic, and use that signal to catch regressions over time.
• Help agents efficiently find the right records and context using structured queries, catalogs, and semantic search.
• Build and ship high quality, production grade software using modern engineering practices, with AI as a core part of your development workflow, pushing the boundaries of AI development tools to deliver secure, optimized, and high quality code.
• Contribute to building and maintaining the shared system context, an explicit repository of system designs, constraints, and standards that enables AI to operate accurately and reliably.
• Critically evaluate code, human or AI generated, for correctness, quality, security, and performance.

Skills

Distributed backend

API design

Production code

AI first approach

Prompt engineering

Structured prompts

Related technical degree

Education

Related technical degree

Job description

To get the best candidate experience, please consider applying for a maximum of 3 roles within 12 months to ensure you are not duplicating efforts.

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.

The Experience

The Agentic Setup team builds AI agents, on a skills based architecture, that turn expert only, multi step product configuration, Org troubleshooting and management into natural language, agent assisted workflows. As part of this team, you will work across agent runtime, capability and skill design, evaluation infrastructure, and the systems that let agents find and act on the right data.

We are looking for a Lead Software Engineer to help us build agentic experiences for product setup and configuration. You will help design a core agent framework, contribute to a growing skills ecosystem, and build the evaluation infrastructure that keeps agent behavior trustworthy as it scales.

This role is based in San Francisco. You'll join a team building intelligent systems that automate the repetitive, elevate the strategic, and power better decisions at scale.

What You’ll Actually Be Doing

• Design and build a core agent framework that hosts many specialized capabilities, orchestrates sub tasks reliably, and integrates seamlessly into human workflows.
• Define the contract for reusable agent skills, focusing on API design, versioning, and composability so many teams can build and contribute consistently.
• Build evaluation infrastructure that measures agent quality even when outputs are non deterministic, and use that signal to catch regressions over time.
• Help agents efficiently find the right records and context using structured queries, catalogs, and semantic search.
• Build and ship high quality, production grade software using modern engineering practices, with AI as a core part of your development workflow, pushing the boundaries of AI development tools to deliver secure, optimized, and high quality code.
• Contribute to building and maintaining the shared system context, an explicit repository of system designs, constraints, and standards that enables AI to operate accurately and reliably.
• Critically evaluate code, human or AI generated, for correctness, quality, security, and performance.

You’re Our Person If...

• You have 6+ years experience designing and building large scale, distributed backend systems.
• You have experience with API design, versioning, and building systems that many teams build on top of.
• You have strong skills in at least one modern programming language and experience shipping production code.
• You can reason clearly about ambiguous, large scale systems and communicate tradeoffs to a team.
• You have a demonstrated, genuine AI first approach to engineering, using AI tools (such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex, or Cursor) to move faster, build fluency across the stack, and contribute well beyond your core specialty.
• You have advanced prompt engineering skills and the ability to write precise, structured prompts, cultivating the system context that makes AI outputs reliable, secure, and production ready.
• You have a related technical degree.

Even Better If...

• You have experience building or working with AI agents, large language model (LLM) based systems, or evaluation infrastructure for non deterministic outputs.
• You have experience with retrieval systems such as semantic search or structured data catalogs.
• You have experience migrating purpose built automation into general, composable APIs.

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.

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. 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.

The typical base salary range for this position is $148,500 - $223,900 annually. In select cities within the San Francisco and New York City metropolitan area, the base salary range for this role is $178,900 - $246,000 annually. The range represents base salary only, and does not include company bonus, incentive for sales roles, equity or benefits, as applicable.

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.