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Job Category

Software Engineering

Job Details

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.

We are hiring a Software Engineering Architect to lead the design and development of next-generation data platforms that power our products. This is a senior, hands-on architecture and engineering role for someone with deep experience building complex software systems, distributed platforms, real-time services, and scalable data infrastructure.

The ideal candidate is not just an architect in the abstract sense. They are an engineer who has built and shipped production systems, understands the tradeoffs behind large-scale technical decisions, and can work closely with product and engineering teams to turn platform strategy into reliable, maintainable software.

This role will help define the technical foundation for new product data platforms, including system architecture, service design, data flow, performance, reliability, developer experience, and long-term platform evolution.

Key Responsibilities

Architecture & Technical Leadership

Lead the architecture of new data platforms that support current and future product capabilities.
Design scalable, reliable, and maintainable systems across data ingestion, processing, storage, APIs, and real-time delivery.
Partner with product, engineering, data, infrastructure, and leadership teams to align technical architecture with business goals.
Make and communicate architectural tradeoffs around latency, consistency, scalability, availability, extensibility, and cost.
Establish engineering patterns, platform standards, and technical direction across teams.
Lead technical design reviews and help teams make sound long-term engineering decisions.

Hands-On Software Engineering

Contribute directly to core platform components, services, APIs, data pipelines, and infrastructure.
Write, review, and guide production-quality code.
Prototype new platform capabilities and help turn them into production systems.
Debug complex issues across application, data, infrastructure, operating system, and network layers.
Improve system performance, reliability, observability, and operational readiness.
Help teams balance rapid product delivery with strong engineering discipline.

Data Platform Development

Design and build new platforms for product data, including real-time and event-driven systems.
Develop architectures for data ingestion, transformation, indexing, storage, access, and lifecycle management.
Create systems that support high-throughput, low-latency, and highly available product experiences.
Work with engineering teams to define service boundaries, data models, APIs, schemas, and integration patterns.
Ensure platforms are designed for extensibility as product requirements evolve.

Distributed & Real-Time Systems

Architect distributed systems that operate reliably under scale, failure, and changing workloads.
Design systems that handle real-time events, asynchronous processing, backpressure, retries, ordering, and fault tolerance.
Guide teams on concurrency, consistency, caching, replication, message-driven architecture, and service coordination.
Build systems with strong observability, including metrics, logs, tracing, alerting, and diagnostic tooling.

Mentorship & Collaboration

Mentor senior engineers and technical leads on architecture, design, and implementation.
Help raise the engineering bar through coaching, documentation, design reviews, and code reviews.
Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Work effectively with globally distributed teams.
Foster a culture of practical engineering, technical ownership, and continuous improvement.

Required Qualifications

15+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant architecture responsibility.
Proven experience designing and building distributed systems in production.
Strong background in data platforms, real-time systems, event-driven architectures, or large-scale backend infrastructure.
Expert-level programming experience in Java or similar production-grade backend languages.
Deep experience with Linux, systems engineering, performance tuning, and production operations.
Strong understanding of database concepts, storage systems, data modeling, indexing, query patterns, and data lifecycle design.
Experience building low-latency, high-throughput, highly available software systems.
Ability to lead technical direction across teams while remaining hands-on.
Strong judgment around architectural tradeoffs, system boundaries, reliability, maintainability, and delivery speed.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience building new data platforms from the ground up.
Experience modernizing legacy systems into scalable product platforms.
Background with event-driven microservices, streaming systems, message brokers, or distributed processing frameworks.
Experience with machine learning platforms, Generative AI systems, scientific computing, or advanced data-intensive products.
Familiarity with cloud-native infrastructure, Kubernetes, observability platforms, distributed tracing, and platform engineering.
Experience contributing to or leading open source software projects.
Experience working across global engineering organizations.
Track record of mentoring senior engineers and influencing architecture across multiple teams.

Technical Areas of Expertise

The successful candidate should bring depth across several of the following areas:

Distributed systems architecture
Real-time and event-driven platforms
Product data platforms
Data ingestion and processing pipelines
Backend service architecture
Database internals and storage concepts
APIs, schemas, and data modeling
Low-latency and high-throughput systems
Java and JVM performance
Linux systems engineering
Observability, monitoring, and production diagnostics
Fault tolerance, resilience, and high availability
Microservices and service-oriented architecture
Cloud-native infrastructure
Machine learning or Generative AI infrastructure
Legacy system modernization

Unleash Your Potential

When you join Salesforce, you’ll be limitless in all areas of your life. Our benefits and resources support you to find balance and be your best, and our AI agents accelerate your impact so you can do your best. Together, we’ll bring the power of Agentforce to organizations of all sizes and deliver amazing experiences that customers love. Apply today to not only shape the future — but to redefine what’s possible — for yourself, for AI, and the world.

Accommodations

If you need a reasonable accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please submit a request via this Accommodations Request Form.

Please note that Salesforce uses artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help our recruiters assess and evaluate candidates’ resumes and qualifications throughout the recruiting process. Humans will always make any candidate selection and hiring decisions. Please see our Candidate Privacy Statement for more information about how we use your personal data and your rights, including with regard to use of AI tools and opt out options.

Posting Statement

Salesforce is an equal opportunity employer and maintains a policy of non-discrimination with all employees and applicants for employment. What does that mean exactly? It means that at Salesforce, we believe in equality for all. And we believe we can lead the path to equality in part by creating a workplace that’s inclusive, and free from discrimination. Know your rights: workplace discrimination is illegal. Any employee or potential employee will be assessed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications – without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression or identity, transgender status, age, disability, veteran or marital status, political viewpoint, or other classifications protected by law. This policy applies to current and prospective employees, no matter where they are in their Salesforce employment journey. It also applies to recruiting, hiring, job assignment, compensation, promotion, benefits, training, assessment of job performance, discipline, termination, and everything in between. Recruiting, hiring, and promotion decisions at Salesforce are fair and based on merit. The same goes for compensation, benefits, promotions, transfers, reduction in workforce, recall, training, and education.

Software Engineering Architect

Job Description