Principal Software Engineer, Data Platform

Principal Software Engineer, Data Platform

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.

The Principal Member of Technical Staff for the Enterprise Data Platform is the primary technical architect responsible for modernizing, integrating, and optimizing Salesforce's foundational data ecosystem. You will serve as the technical "north star" for the engineering teams, bridging the world of modern distributed analytics with the cutting edge of Semantic AI.

In this high‑impact individual contributor role, you will architect the backbone of the company using technologies such as Snowflake, dbt, Informatica, and Airflow—while simultaneously designing and scaling our advanced Knowledge Graph Platform (Neo4j & Top Quadrant). Your mission is to design the paved path where structured data flows effortlessly into high‑value knowledge graphs to power BI, advanced analytics, and generative AI.

You will not just oversee the architecture; you will write the proof‑of‑concepts, define the code standards, and solve the most complex scalability challenges.

• Architect the roadmap: define the long‑term technical architecture for the Enterprise Data Platform, translating business strategy into technical specifications and ensuring our stack allows for "Data Mesh" scalability and domain‑oriented ownership.
• Infrastructure as Code evangelism: personally architect and review the Terraform/Helm configurations that define our infrastructure, ensuring immutable, version‑controlled, and reproducible platforms from Snowflake RBAC to Neo4j clusters.
• Performance engineering: deep dive into the hardest performance bottlenecks, optimizing query planners, data serialization formats (Parquet/Iceberg), and distributed compute costs across Snowflake and Spark.
• AI enablement: design the integration patterns for AI‑assisted tooling (Cursor, MCP, Copilot) within the developer workflow to step‑change developer velocity.

• Graph RAG architecture: lead the technical design of "Graph RAG" (Retrieval‑Augmented Generation), creating patterns that allow LLM agents to query structured Snowflake data via the Neo4j Knowledge Graph.
• Semantic layer design: design the integration between the physical data layer (Snowflake) and the semantic governance layer (Top Quadrant/Top Braid EDG), ensuring ontologies are mechanically enforced rather than theoretically defined.
• Polyglot persistence: define architectural patterns for when data resides in a relational store (Snowflake) versus a graph store (Neo4j), and design high‑velocity pipelines (Kafka/& Airflow) that keep them in sync.

• Code quality & Dev Ops: set the standard for code quality, code, review pull requests, and enforce strict CI/CD pipelines with unit testing and schema validation.
• Resiliency architecture: design self‑healing systems; architect monitoring and alerting frameworks (SRE) to ensure 99.9% availability for critical pipelines.
• Mentorship without authority: act as a technical mentor to senior and lead engineers across multiple squads, elevating the technical bar of the organization through design reviews, RFCs, and pair programming sessions.

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 years focused on backend distributed systems or data infrastructure at scale.
• Expert coder (Python, Java, or Go) comfortable debugging distributed trace, optimizing JVM heap, or rewriting a slow SQL query plan.
• Proven track record of designing large‑scale data platforms, understanding CAP theorem, eventual consistency, and trade‑offs between batch and streaming architectures.
• Hands‑on expert‑level knowledge of Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, and Tableau.
• Deep understanding of graph theory and implementation; expertise in…