Senior Data Platform Engineer: AI & RAG Pipelines

Relha LLC; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 197,000 - 314,000; Full time

Job summary

Salesforce’s Developer Experience team seeks a Principal Data Platform Engineer in San Francisco to design and build backend services powering a Snowflake-based lakehouse. You will lead AI agent systems, RAG pipelines, and platform automation to scale data products securely.

You will mentor peers, set system/API direction, and ensure reliability, cost efficiency, and governance across services, APIs, and deployments.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience designing, building, and operating production backend services at scale.
• Expert-level Python, Go, or Java.
• Hands-on experience building and deploying production AI/LLM applications, including RAG pipelines and tool‑calling agents.
• Strong knowledge of cloud infrastructure (AWS), infrastructure as code, and CI/CD pipelines for containerized services.
• Solid understanding of identity and security practices, including OAuth/OIDC, least-privilege access, and multi-tenant isolation.
• A related technical degree is required.
• Hands-on experience with dbt, Airflow, Snowflake, or Iceberg-based lakehouse architectures.
• Experience with Model Context Protocol (MCP) or building conversational/agentic tools on platforms like Slack.
• Experience layering AI capabilities into production systems and data observability/governance tooling.

Responsibilities

• Design and build backend services and event-driven systems for the data platform.
• Build retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and tool-calling AI agents to improve discoverability and trust of data products.
• Extend the platform with automation, CLI tooling, and shared utilities used by data teams.
• Set technical direction through system and API design, code reviews, mentoring, and owning reliability, delivery, and cost efficiency.

Skills

Backend engineering

Python/Go/Java

Cloud/AWS

Security best practices

CI/CD

Education

Bachelor's degree in a technical field

Tools

Snowflake

dbt

Airflow

Iceberg

Job description

Salesforce’s Developer Experience team seeks a Principal Data Platform Engineer in San Francisco to design and build backend services powering a Snowflake-based lakehouse. You will lead AI agent systems, RAG pipelines, and platform automation to scale data products securely.

You will mentor peers, set system/API direction, and ensure reliability, cost efficiency, and governance across services, APIs, and deployments.