Software Engineering Principal Architect

Salesforce • San Francisco, CA

1d

About The Position

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 building the next generation of trusted enterprise computing in the cloud. Our team is fast-paced, metrics-driven, and deeply collaborative, working across the full technology stack. We specialize in transactional systems, distributed systems, and enterprise-grade reliability, availability, and scale. We are seeking a highly accomplished and energetic Principal Architect to lead the design and evolution of scalable, resilient, and fault-tolerant transactional and distributed systems. This is a strategic, hands-on architecture role with end-to-end ownership of the Transactional Layer Storage and Compute stack. You will be responsible for shaping and driving the architecture for metadata persistence, log persistence, data persistence, and database compute. These systems are operated and evolved through a control plane that enforces safe change compliance and meets strict Trust SLAs, including resiliency, self-healing, autoscaling, and the seamless introduction of new substrates and features. As a Principal Architect, you will envision and drive service automation outcomes, ensuring operational excellence at enterprise scale while influencing both technical direction and engineering culture.

Requirements

• Proven experience designing and building scalable, resilient, and fault-tolerant transactional and distributed systems in enterprise production environments
• Strong leadership and communication skills, with the ability to influence across teams and levels
• Highly inventive, pragmatic, and delivery-focused, with a track record of incremental, on-time execution
• Expert-level Java development experience in Unix/Linux environments
• Deep understanding of object-oriented programming, modern design patterns, and system architecture principles
• Strong experience using telemetry, metrics, and observability to drive operational excellence
• High engineering rigor, including writing functional and unit tests and participating in peer code reviews
• Experience working in Agile development environments with a commitment to continuous improvement
• 15+ years of professional experience, or a Master’s degree in a relevant field with 12+ years of professional experience

Nice To Haves

• Experience with relational databases is a strong plus

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve highly scalable, resilient, and fault-tolerant transactional and distributed system architectures
• Provide architectural leadership for transactional storage and compute, including metadata, logs, and database compute layers
• Drive automation and operational excellence through control-plane-driven architectures
• Ensure systems meet strict Trust SLAs for availability, reliability, scalability, and self-healing
• Collaborate across engineering, operations, and product teams to align architecture with business and platform goals
• Use telemetry and metrics to guide design decisions and continuous improvement
• Mentor senior engineers while remaining open to learning and feedback
• Contribute hands-on when needed, including design reviews, code reviews, and critical implementations

Benefits

• Salesforce offers a variety of benefits to help you live well including: time off programs, medical, dental, vision, mental health support, paid parental leave, life and disability insurance, 401(k), and an employee stock purchasing program.
• More details about company benefits can be found at the following link: https://www.salesforcebenefits.com.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal