Staff Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure

Salesforce•Seattle, WA

About The Position

Salesforce is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the Data Infrastructure team within the broader Data Engineering organization. The team's mission is to build secure, reliable, performant, scalable, and cost-efficient infrastructure that powers Slack’s data ecosystem. They design and operate core data platforms enabling data engineers, analysts, and machine learning practitioners to deliver trusted insights and data products across Slack. The role involves designing, developing, and operating services that underpin data ingestion, transformation, storage, compute, and orchestration at a massive scale. As a Staff Engineer, you will be a Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) for multiple core data services, accountable for uptime, reliability, and performance, and a subject matter expert (SME) across multiple systems. The team works on enabling real-time OLAP capabilities, scaling compute and orchestration layers, and creating/scaling agents to assist engineers and users with their workflow and data needs.

Requirements

U.S. Citizenship or Permanent Residency (Green Card holder). We are unable to provide visa sponsorship for this role.
10+ years of software, platform, or infrastructure engineering experience, including time spent supporting data-intensive systems or data platforms.
Excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate across cross-functional teams.
Proven experience in building, deploying, and operating distributed infrastructure at scale.
Strong technical background with big data and infrastructure technologies — such as Pinot, StarRocks, Trino, EMR, Airflow, Hive Metastore, Kubernetes, or equivalent systems.
Proficiency in Python, Golang, Bash, and SQL.
Proficiency with CI/CD (GitHub Actions), Vault, Terraform, Chef, and Grafana.
Deep understanding of infrastructure reliability, observability, and cost efficiency principles.
A strong sense of ownership and a drive to deliver high-impact, autonomous results.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience supporting data pipelines or data engineering workflows is a strong plus.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and operate reliable and scalable data infrastructure powering Slack’s analytics, ML, and data-driven decision-making.
Serve as DRI for multiple core data services specifically on our analytics infrastructure (e.g., StarRocks, Pinot, and Trino), ensuring uptime, reliability, and our compute and orchestration services (e.g., Airflow, Temporal, EMR, Hive Metastore).
Drive improvements in security, cost efficiency, and developer experience across our data infrastructure.
Build automation and self-service tools that empower our team and other data teams to easily adopt and manage data workflows.
Collaborate closely with data engineering, platform, and security teams to design scalable, well-governed solutions.
Build and enhance our observability, monitoring, and alerting on our services via Grafana and related tooling.
Partner with other staff and senior engineers to define best practices, technical standards, and support models for Slack’s data ecosystem.
Mentor and coach other engineers, modeling ownership, collaboration, and operational excellence.