Staff Software Engineer, Distributed Data Services - Slack

Slack•Atlanta, GA

2d•$197,300 - $344,700•Onsite

About The Position

Salesforce is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Distributed Data Services team, focusing on building and maintaining high-performance services that operate at tremendous scale, processing millions of events per second. These services are critical for Slack's functionality, ensuring exceptional performance, high availability, reliability, and scalability. The team's work is essential for making Slack work seamlessly, though they do not typically ship new user-facing features. Slack's backend services are written in Go and Java, with its API built on PHP/Hack. The Distributed Data Services team specifically builds critical services that enable Slack to scale for its largest customers, including edge caches for latency-critical queries, Enterprise Key Management, and International Data Residency features. They also power core Slack functionalities like shared channels and privacy-preserving image proxy. The team is actively building the future of edge services at Slack to support a growing number of globally distributed customers with their compliance requirements and minimal latency.

Requirements

U.S. Citizenship or Permanent Residency required.
10+ years building and operating large-scale systems professionally, with concrete examples of what you've shipped and owned.
Hands-on experience managing critical production infrastructure — driving reliability and uptime with a customer-first view of operational safety.
Deep experience with reliable, safe distributed systems, and the judgment to weigh engineering vs. product trade-offs and argue persuasively for either.
A track record of untangling complex issues that demand deep knowledge of a company's existing architecture.
Strong fundamentals in unit testing, code review, design documentation, debugging, and troubleshooting — you've built and operated web applications professionally and can speak in depth about what you and your teams have delivered.
A curious, determined mindset that gets energized (not deterred) by things breaking.

Nice To Haves

Go programming language exposure.
AWS
Building and releasing software with Docker containers
Kubernetes
Experience in highly regulated environments where FEDRAMP/NIST frameworks were essential.

Responsibilities

Maintain and build performant services including Edge Caches, Enterprise Key Management, International Data Residency, and Image Uploads, Downloads, and Proxying.
Ensure systems are exceptionally performant, highly available, reliable, and scalable.
Build critical services that enable Slack to scale for its largest customers.
Power core Slack functionality such as shared channels, privacy-preserving image proxy, and other key day-to-day parts of the customer's experience.
Actively build the future of edge services at Slack to support a growing number of globally distributed customers with their compliance requirements with minimal latency.