Principal Data Engineer

Salesforce Salesforce · Enterprise · San Francisco, CA +1

Principal Data Engineer role focused on architecting, building, and scaling data platforms, lakehouses, and high-throughput pipelines for an AI CRM product. The role involves designing and deploying production-grade data pipelines and feature stores to support autonomous AI agents and decision systems, ensuring reliability and performance. Requires strong data engineering, systems architecture, and software engineering skills, with experience in AI/agentic infrastructure.

What you'd actually do

  1. Data Architecture & Strategy: Architect, build, and scale the foundational data platforms, lakehouses, and high-throughput pipelines that power AgentExchange product analytics, metrics, and agentic workflows.
  2. Agentic Infrastructure & Orchestration: Design and deploy production-grade data pipelines, feature stores, and event-driven architectures that enable autonomous AI agents to operate reliably at enterprise scale.
  3. Platform Excellence & Reliability: Establish end-to-end data governance, quality frameworks, lineage tracking, and performance monitoring to ensure zero-downtime reliability for mission-critical data assets.
  4. Cross-Functional Engineering Leadership: Serve as the principal technical authority on data architecture, partnering seamlessly with decision scientists, software engineers, and product managers to translate complex business needs into elegant technical systems.
  5. Technical Roadmap Ownership: Co-own the long-term data technology roadmap for AgentExchange, anticipating scale bottlenecks and driving architectural evolution ahead of product growth.

Skills

Required

  • 7+ years of hands-on data engineering experience building complex, enterprise-scale data platforms, distributed systems, and real-time data pipelines
  • Mastery of modern distributed computing, data lakehouse architectures, and cloud data warehouses
  • deep expertise in orchestration tools (e.g., Airflow, Dagster)
  • Demonstrated experience engineering data systems for LLMs, agentic workflows, feature stores, or vector retrieval pipelines
  • Expert proficiency in Python, Scala, or Java
  • expert-level SQL tuning
  • deep familiarity with software engineering best practices (Docker, Git, CI/CD, IaC)
  • Strong communication skills with a proven track record of distilling complex system architecture decisions into clear business trade-offs for technical and non-technical executives alike

Nice to have

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline (or equivalent practical impact)

What the JD emphasized

  • actively shipping production code alongside architectural leadership

Other signals

  • design, scale, and maintain the enterprise-grade data infrastructure, real-time pipelines, and feature stores that feed both high-stakes decision systems and autonomous AI agents
  • transform high-volume data streams into pristine, reliable, and high-performing technical foundations
  • build the data plumbing that makes AI systems fast, accurate, and scalable