Senior / Lead Software Engineer - Database/Distributed Storage Engineering

100 Salesforce, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 117,000 - 286,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical

Dental

Vision

Mental health support

401(k)

Employee stock purchase program

Job summary

Salesforce Database Team seeks a Senior/Lead Software Engineer to build scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems and to advance AI-driven software development. You will design, develop, and test enterprise-grade software with a strong emphasis on reliability, security, and performance, leveraging cutting-edge AI tooling.

You will contribute to architecture and hands-on implementation, mentor teammates, and drive continuous improvements in development practices in a fast-paced, collaborative

Qualifications

• Demonstrates AI-first engineering approach across the stack.
• Experience with AI tools in development workflows.
• Advanced prompt engineering to ensure reliable AI outputs.
• Experience designing scalable, resilient distributed systems in production.
• Proficiency in Java or C in Unix/Linux environments.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship high-quality production software with AI as a core part of the workflow.
• Design and orchestrate complex systems where AI agents integrate into human workflows.
• Contribute to a shared system context with designs, constraints, and standards for reliable AI operation.
• Evaluate code for correctness, quality, security, and performance.

Skills

AI-first eng

AI tools

Prompt engineering

Distributed systems

Java/C

Telemetry/metrics

Agile

Mentoring

Team collaboration

Problem solving

Tools

Claude Code

GitHub Copilot

Codex

Cursor

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

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.

Salesforce Database Team

Our Salesforce Database (SDB) team provides a highly available database for Salesforce applications. Within the large SDB team, we provide a highly durable and available distributed storage for public clouds. We are defining the next generation of trusted enterprise computing in the cloud. We're a fast-paced, metrics driven team. We're highly collaborative and work across all areas of our technology stack. We live and breathe transactional systems, distributed systems and enterprise reliability, availability and scale.

Senior/Lead Software Engineer Overview

The team is seeking a highly qualified and energetic Senior/Lead Software Engineer who will be responsible for working on development scalable, resilient and fault tolerant transactional and distributed systems. The Senior/Lead Software Engineer will be responsible both for design and hands‑on implementation. The software engineer role at Salesforce encompasses architecture, design, implementation, and testing to ensure we build products right and release them with high quality. Equally important is advanced prompt engineering — the ability to write precise, structured prompts and cultivate the system context that makes AI outputs reliable, secure, and production‑ready.

Job Responsibilities

• Build and ship high‑quality, production‑grade software using modern engineering practices, with AI as a core part of your development workflow by pushing the boundaries of AI development tools to deliver secure, optimized, and high‑quality code.
• Design and orchestrate complex systems where AI agents integrate seamlessly into human workflows, driving efficiency and innovation at scale.
• 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.

Required Skills

• A demonstrated, genuine AI‑first approach to engineering — using AI to move faster, build fluency across the stack, and contribute well beyond your core specialty.
• Experience using AI tools (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex, Cursor, etc.) in development workflows.
• Advanced prompt engineering skills and the ability to write precise, structured prompts and cultivate the system context that makes AI outputs reliable, secure, and production‑ready.
• Experience designing, developing scalable, resilient and fault tolerant transactional and distributed systems in enterprise production environments.
• Highly skilled in Java or C in a Unix/ Linux Environment, with an understanding of modern object‑oriented programming techniques and design patterns.
• Experience using telemetry and metrics to drive operational excellence.
• Ability to learn quickly and deliver high quality code in a fast‑paced, dynamic team environment.
• A meticulous and detailed oriented engineer, responsible for writing one’s own functional and unit tests and help review and test teammates' code.
• Familiar with Agile development methodology and committed to continual improvement of team performance.
• Effective communication, strong leadership skills, team player who is capable of mentoring and being mentored by others.
• Inventive and creative; on task and able to deliver incrementally and on time.
• You should have 5-9+ years of professional experience, or a M.Sc. in a relevant academic field and 3-7+ years of professional experience.
• Experience with relational databases and or distributed storage, GCP is a big plus.

Highly Available Distributed Systems

Areas where you may be working on include highly scalable, highly performant distributed systems with highly available and durable data storage capabilities that ensure high availability of the stack above that includes databases. A thorough understanding of distributed systems, system programming, working with system resources is required. Practical knowledge for challenges regarding clustering solutions, hands‑on experience in deploying your code in the public cloud environments, working knowledge of Kubernetes and working with APIs provided by various public cloud vendors to handle data are highly desired skills.

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.

Accommodations

If you need a reasonable accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please submit a request via this Accommodations Request Form. Please note that Salesforce uses artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help our recruiters assess and evaluate candidates’ resumes and qualifications throughout the recruiting process. Humans will always make any candidate selection and hiring decisions. Please see our Candidate Privacy Statement for more information about how we use your personal data and your rights, including with regard to use of AI tools and opt out options.

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 or 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)
• an employee stock purchasing program

More details about company benefits can be found at the following link: https://www.salesforcebenefits.com.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring, Salesforce will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. At Salesforce, we believe in equitable compensation practices that reflect the dynamic nature of labour markets across various regions.

The typical base salary range for this position is $117,200 - $260,100 annually. In select cities within the San Francisco and New York City metropolitan area, the base salary range for this role is $141,200 - $285,800 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.