Principal Data Platform Engineer

Salesforce•San Francisco, CA

9d•$237,700 - $344,700•Onsite

About The Position

The Developer Experience team builds the tooling, paved paths, and automation that let Salesforce's data teams ship discoverable, governed, and consumable data products quickly and safely. As our Principal Data Platform Engineer, based in San Francisco, you'll design and build the backend services, data-platform automation, and AI agent systems that power our Snowflake-based lakehouse — setting technical direction for how the rest of the org builds on top of it.

Requirements

15+ years of experience designing, building, and operating production backend services at scale, with expert-level Python, Go, or Java.
Hands-on experience building and deploying production AI/LLM applications, including RAG pipelines and tool-calling agents — not just research or prototypes.
Deep experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS), infrastructure as code, and CI/CD pipelines for containerized services.
Strong knowledge of identity and security practices, including OAuth/OIDC, least-privilege access, and multi-tenant isolation.
A related technical degree required.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience with dbt, Airflow, Snowflake, or Iceberg-based lakehouse architectures.
Experience with Model Context Protocol (MCP) or built conversational/agentic tools on a platform like Slack.
Experience layering AI capabilities into existing production systems.
Experience with data observability or data-quality/governance tooling.

Responsibilities

Design and build backend services and event-driven systems that support our data platform, including AI agent runtimes and API integrations.
Build retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and tool-calling AI agents that make our data products and catalog easier to discover, query, and trust.
Extend the platform's automation, command-line tooling, and shared utilities that data teams rely on as their day-to-day interface to the platform.
Set technical direction through system and API design, code review, and mentoring, while owning service reliability, delivery, and cost efficiency.