Principal AI Engineer

About the role

This is a hands-on Software Engineering Principal/Architect role embedded directly inside the Salesforce Marketing organization. You will act as the principal technical builder and architect who identifies the most time-consuming, repeatable workflows across Marketing — campaign creation, audience segmentation, content production, performance analysis and reporting — and designs and builds production-grade AI agents that own them end-to-end.

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)
• Salesforce certifications (Administrator, Marketing Cloud Consultant, Agentforce, etc.) are a plus but not required
• Demonstrated AI-first engineering mindset — 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