Lead/Principal Performance Engineer

Salesforce•San Francisco, CA

8d•$207,800 - $344,700•Hybrid

About The Position

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 Lead/Principal Performance Engineer is a high-level technical leader and you are a performance and scale subject matter expert who drives innovation, designs high-scale automation frameworks, and ensures product reliability. You prevent bottlenecks before they happen through architectural influence, database tuning, and deep root cause analysis. You bring a multiplier effect to every team you join — elevating engineers around you and owning the most complex, systemic performance challenges from initial design through production. This role follows a hybrid schedule of 1-3 days per week in office.

Requirements

10+ years of experience as a software engineer or developer building platforms and applications at massive scale, including hands-on automation development.
Expert-level proficiency in Java, including Java Virtual Machine (JVM) performance tuning and Garbage Collection (GC) mechanisms, along with experience in Python, C, or Ruby on Rails.
Deep understanding of key performance metrics across throughput, latency, memory, central processing unit (CPU), disk, and network — with the ability to debug and resolve bottlenecks across all of them.
Strong communicator with a proven track record in Application Programming Interface (API) design, concurrency, resource efficiency, and the ability to present technical findings clearly to both engineers and executives.

Nice To Haves

Professional experience applying AI tools in automation or performance engineering contexts.
Familiarity with distributed data and transport systems such as Apache Kafka, Apache Cassandra, or Apache Spark.
Salesforce platform experience or Salesforce certifications.
A related technical degree.

Responsibilities

Lead performance efforts across multi-team projects by designing traffic models, establishing scale goals, and implementing sophisticated automation and monitoring strategies.
Serve as the expert in database tuning and system optimization, driving design meetings by questioning implementation choices and proposing high-performance alternatives.
Rapidly build proofs of concept and lead research spikes to test ideas and address critical scale issues through rapid prototyping and fast iteration.
Coach and mentor engineers at all levels, lead code and design reviews, and partner with product managers to ensure performance is a core part of the definition of done.