Principal Backend Software Engineer

To get the best candidate experience, please consider applying for a maximum of 3 roles within 12 months to ensure you are not duplicating efforts.

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.

About the Role:

Salesforce has immediate opportunities for software engineers who want their lines of code to have significant and measurable positive impact for users, the company's bottom line, and the industry. You will be working with a group of world-class engineers to build the breakthrough features our customers will love, adopt, and use while keeping our trusted CRM platform stable and scalable.

As a Principal Member of Technical Staff (PMTS) at Salesforce, you will leverage deep expertise to lead the architectural design and technical implementation of critical, large-scale systems, ensuring they remain robust, efficient, and innovative.
The software engineer role at Salesforce encompasses architecture, design, implementation, and testing to ensure we build products right and release them with high quality. We embrace the hybrid model and celebrate the individual strengths of each team member while encouraging everyone to grow into the best version of themselves.

Your Impact:

• Build and ship high-quality, production-grade backend software using modern engineering practices, with AI as a core part of your development workflow — pushing the boundaries of AI development tools to deliver secure, optimized, and high-quality code.

• Design and orchestrate complex distributed systems where AI agents integrate seamlessly into human workflows, driving efficiency and innovation at scale.

• Contribute to building and maintaining the shared system context — an explicit repository of system designs, constraints, and standards that enables AI to operate accurately and reliably.

• Critically evaluate code (human or AI-generated) for correctness, quality, security, and performance.

• Lead the end-to-end architecture, technical implementation, and scaling of critical backend and distributed systems, including the design and evolution of highly scalable APIs.

• Drive technical excellence and innovation across the organization by establishing high standards for code quality, performance, reliability, and security; championing best practices, advanced CI/CD pipelines, and emerging enterprise technologies.

• Mentor and inspire team members, fostering a culture of continuous learning and growth, while collaborating with cross-functional teams to align technical strategy with business outcomes.

• Identify and resolve systemic issues — performance bottlenecks, reliability gaps, and technical debt — with long-term, scalable solutions.

Required Qualifications:

• 10+ years of experience in backend software development and large-scale system architecture.

• A demonstrated, genuine AI-first approach to engineering. Using AI to move faster, build fluency across the stack, and contribute well beyond your core specialty.

• Experience using AI tools (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex, Cursor, etc.) in development workflows

• Advanced prompt engineering skills and the ability to write precise, structured prompts and cultivate the system context that makes AI outputs reliable, secure, and production-ready.

• Mastery of multiple programming languages and design patterns (e.g., Java, Python, Go, Node.js, Scala) and proven expertise designing distributed systems, microservices, and cloud-native architectures at scale.

• Solid knowledge of web API standards (REST, SOAP, HTTP, JSON) and relational/non-relational databases (e.g., MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB).

• Experience leading technical initiatives, driving cross-team alignment, and influencing engineering direction.

• Strong communication skills — able to write clear design docs and build consensus across teams.

• Degree or equivalent relevant experience required. Experience will be evaluated based on the core competencies for the role (e.g. extracurricular leadership roles, military experience, volunteer roles, work experience, etc.)

Preferred Qualifications:

• Hands-on experience developing SaaS applications over public cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or GCP).

• Proficiency in container orchestration systems (Kubernetes, EKS, Docker).

• Knowledge of microservices architecture and distributed systems design patterns.

• Experience with event-driven architectures, message queues (e.g., Kafka), caching layers (e.g., Redis, Memcached), or data streaming technologies.

• Background in observability, performance engineering, or reliability/site reliability engineering.

• Active participation in open-source communities or contributions to relevant projects.

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.