Principal AI Engineer

About the role

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!

Responsibilities

• Partner closely with Marketing strategy, operations, and creative leads to surface highest-impact, repeatable workflows.
• Design comprehensive end-to-end workflow architectures, identifying automation boundaries, human-in-the-loop decision gates, error handling, retry logic, and fallback paths.
• Prioritize opportunities and maintain a clear technical roadmap that balances impact, complexity, and dependencies.
• Architect and build scalable, reliable AI agents that execute full marketing workflows (brief generation, audience building, content creation, approval routing, performance reporting, etc.).
• Design and implement distributed systems that securely integrate with Marketing’s existing tools: Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Agentforce, Slack, Google Workspace, and internal data platforms.
• Apply modern software architecture principles (spec-driven design, event-driven design, microservices patterns where appropriate, observability, fault tolerance) to ensure agents are production-grade and can scale with Marketing’s growing demands.
• Ship high-quality, secure, testable code using current engineering practices while aggressively leveraging AI coding tools to accelerate delivery.
• Define and instrument success metrics for every agent (time saved, throughput, accuracy, cost, observability).
• Maintain and evolve a shared, explicit system context repository (architecture decisions, constraints, standards, domain knowledge) that enables reliable AI operation.
• Critically review all code — whether human or AI-generated — for correctness, security, performance, and maintainability.
• Communicate technical trade-offs and architectural decisions clearly to non-technical Marketing leadership.

Requirements

• 9+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 4+ years explicitly in software architecture or principal/engineer-level roles.
• Strong experience designing and building distributed systems — handling concurrency, state management, fault tolerance, eventual consistency, and observability at scale.
• Proven track record shipping production-grade software that real users rely on daily (not just prototypes or internal tools).
• Hands-on experience integrating enterprise platforms via APIs (Salesforce, Marketing Cloud, Slack, Google Workspace, or equivalent).
• Experience designing and deploying AI-assisted agents or LLM-powered workflows in production environments.
• Deep comfort with modern development practices: automated testing, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, security & compliance controls.
• Strong written and verbal communication — able to produce clear architecture diagrams, decision records, workflow maps, and stakeholder updates.

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Agentforce, or the broader Salesforce platform.
• Background that blends deep engineering with product or operations exposure (founding engineer, early-stage startup, or similar).
• Background in Salesforce certifications (Administrator, Marketing Cloud Consultant, Agentforce, etc.) is a plus but not required.
• Extensive real-world use of tools like Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, etc., to move faster while maintaining quality.
• Advanced skills in prompt engineering, system context design, and evaluation frameworks for reliable AI output.
• Passion for marketing technology and a genuine desire to amplify Marketing creativity and velocity through world-class software architecture.

Benefits

At Salesforce, we offer 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.

Pay

The typical base salary range for this position is $218,400 - $365,200 annually. In select cities within the San Francisco and New York City metropolitan area, the base salary range for this role is $263,200 - $401,400 annually.

Schedule

Full-time.