Principal Operations Engineer

About the Role

Salesforce's Digital Enterprise Technology organization is building something new: a modern, engineering-first operations function designed to move the entire organization from reactive, manual processes to automated, intelligent, and proactive operations  a Principal Operations Engineer focused on Operational Excellence, you'll be one of the founding technical leaders of this team — defining how DET detects, responds to, and prevents issues while eliminating toil and raising the reliability bar for critical, customer-facing systems.

This is a high-visibility, high-impact role for someone who wants to shape not just what gets built, but how an organization operates.

Automation & Operational Engineering

• Lead the design and implementation of automation-first operations, eliminating manual workflows across incident management, alerting, escalation, runbooks, and day-to-day operational processes
• Build and scale alert-to-incident automation pipelines to accelerate detection and response times
• Identify and prioritize high-impact toil reduction opportunities across the ecosystem
• Drive adoption of self-healing systems and automated remediation patterns
• Provide Tier 2+ advanced application support for complex production issues and lead deep-dive investigations into system failures
• Drive a culture of automation-first thinking, ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement

Incident, Reliability & Operational Excellence

• Lead the evolution from reactive incident response to proactive reliability engineering, improving MTTD, MTTR, and the percentage of incidents detected automatically
• Serve as a key technical leader in incident management, escalation strategy, and post-incident analysis
• Establish and enforce SLI, SLA, and SLO frameworks across critical Tier‑1 services
• Drive deep understanding of system dependencies and failure modes

Customer-Centric Operations

• Architect operational strategies with a focus on customer intent, experience, and outcomes
• Identify and prioritize critical user journeys, ensuring they are observable, reliable, and performant
• Align operational priorities with business impact

Operational Strategy & Roadmap

• Partner with stakeholders to define and execute quarterly and annual operational roadmaps (OKRs)
• Translate business needs into scalable operational capabilities, balancing reliability, speed, and cost efficiency

• 12+ years of experience in engineering, operations engineering, SRE, or related roles
• Proven track record of automating complex operational workflows and improving reliability and operational maturity at scale
• Deep expertise in incident management systems, observability (metrics, logging, tracing), and distributed systems and microservices
• Strong experience with automation frameworks, scripting, Infrastructure as Code, and modern Dev Ops practices
• Experience operating high-availability, customer-facing systems in enterprise environments
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to influence senior engineering leaders and drive outcomes across teams without formal authority
• A related technical degree required.

• Experience building self-service or platform-based operational tooling
• Background in automation-driven operations or platform engineering
• Experience leading large-scale incident management transformations
• Familiarity with AI/ML-driven operations (AIOps)
• Experience in SaaS/PaaS enterprise environments
• Salesforce ecosystem experience (Apex, LWC, APIs, etc.)

This is a rare opportunity to build a modern operations discipline from the ground up — not maintain something inherited — with full visibility into engineering leadership and a real mandate to drive change. You'll work alongside strong engineering, SRE, and platform teams on problems that directly affect Salesforce's internal products and customer-facing systems. If you want to do the most technically interesting work of your career while shaping how an entire organization runs, this role is it.

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