Sr. Engineering Manager, Core Services - Slack

Salesforce; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Salesforce is seeking an experienced Senior Backend Engineer to lead the Core Services portfolio, including Edge Caches, Realtime Services, and International Data Residency, with a focus on reliability and scalability for enterprise workloads.

You'll drive a multi-system migration of Flannel to Loom, own on-call operations for Tier 0 services, and partner across Product, Compliance, Security, AWS, and other teams to deliver high-impact infrastructure at scale.

Qualifications

• 5+ years leading engineering teams for high-scale backend infrastructure.
• Strong fundamentals in software engineering, architecture, caching, observability and reliability.
• Experience owning Tier 0/Tier 1 services with on-call rotations and incident response.
• Experience with realtime messaging systems or event-driven architectures.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction and roadmap across Core Services: Edge Caches, Realtime Services, EKM, IDR, and Image Proxying.
• Lead the Flannel to Loom migration while keeping current systems reliable for millions of users.
• Drive delivery with reliability-first mindset: sprint planning, launches, incident follow-ups, and cost analysis.
• Own on-call operations for Tier 0 services and coordinate rotations across teams.
• Partner across Product, Sales, Compliance, Security, AWS, and infra teams on dependencies and risks.
• Represent work in leadership reviews, quarterly planning, and executive forums.
• Build a high-trust team culture, hire well, mentor leaders, and celebrate wins.
• Drive the use of AI development tooling while maintaining engineering rigor.

Skills

5+ years leadership

Distributed systems

Backend

On-call ownership

Architecture discussions

Job description

Job Category

Software Engineering

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.

About The Opportunity

We operate at tremendous scale with systems that process millions of events per second. Our team maintains and builds performant services that include:

• Edge Caches
• Realtime Services
• Enterprise Key Management (EKM)
• International Data Residency (IDR)
• Image Uploads, Downloads, and Proxying

We've done our job correctly when none of our users think about us, much like a vital utility. We don't typically ship new user-facing features, but rather ensure our systems are exceptionally performant, highly available, reliable, and scalable. In other words, we make Slack work seamlessly. Slack's backend services are written in Go and Java, and Slack's API is built on PHP/Hack.

We are a team building critical services that enable Slack to scale for our largest customers. Our edge caches power the most latency-critical queries for our largest entities today, serving approximately 35% of all Slack API traffic. Our Realtime Services (RTS) power Slack's core messaging stack — running 10 services, 4 of which are mission‑critical Tier 0 services — ensuring that messages, presence, and real‑time events are delivered reliably at scale. We also own services that power Slack's Enterprise Key Management and International Data Residency features, enabling Slack to win and retain enterprise and government customers with strict compliance requirements (FedRAMP/NIST).

We have a strong commitment to quality and understand that simplicity and reliability are the foundations of our work.

We are actively building the future of edge services at Slack, so we can support a growing number of globally distributed customers with their compliance requirements with minimal latency.

What You'll Be Doing

• Owning the technical direction and roadmap across the Core Services portfolio: Edge Caches, Realtime Services, Enterprise Key Management, International Data Residency, and Image Proxying and Uploads. You’ll have large footprint and the opportunity to drive major impact. And you'll decide what to invest in now, what to sequence later, and what to decline — balancing reliability, migration, and new capability work.
• Leading a multi‑system migration of Flannel to Loom, our next‑generation edge cache, while keeping the current systems running at full reliability for millions of users. You'll drive the team to ship new capabilities without introducing risk to infrastructure that people depend on daily.
• Driving delivery and execution while maintaining reliability as a top priority, including sprint planning, product launches, incident follow‑ups, operational sustainability analyses, and building the technical case for investment with leadership. You'll ensure the team doesn't trade reliability for velocity, but is always high‑performing.
• Owning on‑call operations and incident management for Tier 0 services. You'll manage on‑call rotations across partnering teams, triage production issues, lead incident response for your services, and drive improvements to runbooks, alerting, and operational tooling.
• Partnering cross‑functionally with Product, Sales, Compliance, Security, AWS, and other infrastructure teams on dependencies, timelines, and risks. You'll be the shortest path to solutions — whether it's unblocking a compliance audit for South Korea, coordinating IDR region launches with Sales and AWS, or negotiating priorities with partner teams for shared work.
• Representing your team's work in leadership reviews, quarterly and annual planning, and executive forums. You'll build compelling business‑and‑technical cases for your team's investments and tell your leadership what's really going on early enough that nothing becomes a fire drill.
• Building and maintaining a high‑trust team culture where engineers do impactful work and grow. You'll hire well, manage performance with fairness and transparency, mentor emerging technical leaders, and celebrate your team's wins.
• Managing cost and capacity for services that run at massive scale, working with finance on AWS spend trends, exec‑approved budget increases, and cost‑saving initiatives like the Loom migration (projected $1-2M savings).
• Driving the team to adopt AI development tooling for maximum impact, while maintaining engineering rigor and quality for critical infrastructure.

You're Our Person If

• You've led engineering teams for 5+ years building and operating high‑scale, high‑availability backend infrastructure or distributed systems.
• You have strong software engineering fundamentals with previous experience as a Senior+ backend engineer, with enough depth to be credible in architecture discussions about caching, distributed systems, observability and reliability best practices, and system design — and to build SME knowledge in a new area fast.
• You have a history of managing Tier 0 / Tier 1 services where uptime matters deeply, including owning on‑call rotations, leading incident response, and driving operational improvements.
• You have experience with realtime messaging systems or event