Software Engineer II, Datastores

Job Category

Software Engineering

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.

Slack’s Data stores team builds and operates the database platform powering Slack. We write software to manage thousands of stateful hosts, providing several petabytes of online database capacity. We are building one of the fastest-growing database platforms in the world. Our MySQL databases run in Vitess. You can read more about our migration to Vitess at:
Scaling Data stores at Slack with Vitess.

Slack enables people all over the world to communicate and collaborate together. Teams of all scales from the world’s largest public companies to the smallest of startups use Slack to get work done, so we take performance and reliability very seriously. A taste of our scale: 5billion+ messages are sent per week, half of those outside the United States. Every day we see over 10M+ daily active users, 30billion web requests, and 200billion database queries.

For millions of people, Slack is the primary communication tool they use at work all day long. They expect it to be exceptionally reliable and fast, all the time.

We operate at tremendous scale with systems that process millions of events per second. Teams in our group maintain and build the lower levels of our stack, including edge services, data stores and caches, real‑time messaging, and asynchronous background job processing. We know we’ve done our job correctly when none of our users think about us. We don’t typically ship user‑facing features, but rather ensure our systems are incredibly performant, highly available, reliable, and scalable.

Slack’s API and web backend is built on PHP/Hack, our backend services are written in Java and Go, and we use Vitess as our storage engine. Our architecture is constantly evolving to handle millions more users.

Over the course of a typical week you will:

• Operate and enhance our large, highly‑available database infrastructure, utilizing technologies such as MySQL and Vitess.
• Develop tools to enable self‑service and self‑managing capabilities of our database infrastructure so that other teams can operate full‑stack while rapidly building new features for our customers.
• Collaborate with engineering teams on their database storage needs, and advise them throughout the development lifecycle.
• Write code to capture database performance, and create tools and dashboards to provide actionable insight into that data.
• Participate in our on‑call rotation and collaborate with our operations team to triage and resolve production issues.

You may be a fit for this role if you:

• Have been working in Database, Site Reliability Engineering, or infrastructure‑owning teams with increasing responsibilities for 3+ years.
• Have professional experience using Go, PHP/Hacklang, Python, Ruby, or Java.
• Write code that can be easily understood by others with an eye toward clarity and maintainability.
• Have experience working with distributed data storage systems, at scale and in a team environment. Some examples include a relational database like MySQL/Postgres, or systems like Kafka, Cassandra, or Elastic Search.
• Have deployed server software on Linux, then operated it ’ve debugged its problems, and analyzed and optimized its performance.
• Have experience operating cloud infrastructure, especially AWS.
• Are familiar with deployment automation / configuration management tools like Chef, Terraform, Ansible, or Puppet.
• Are excited to learn new technologies, explain technical concepts, and identify trade‑offs to find the best‑suited solution for a problem.
• Are curious about how things work; when they break you are eager and able to help fix them.

If you need a reasonable accommodation during the application or the…