Principal Engineer

Join a team of 10 within Salesforce AI Labs, bringing computer-use AI into production with the autonomy of a small startup and the reach of Salesforce.

As a Principal Engineer, you'll remain hands-on while shaping architecture across our agent and backend systems, owning critical capabilities from design through operation, and helping other engineers deliver them.

Responsibilities

Drive Agent Development & Architecture

• Design and build systems that learn from demonstrations and combine AI reasoning with deterministic execution to complete workflows reliably.
• Develop recovery and verification capabilities so agents can adapt to changes, confirm outcomes, and recognize when human intervention is needed.
• Build backend services with robust workflow state management, failure handling, and secure access to customer environments.
• Create evaluations and diagnostics that measure task success, expose regressions, and make failures understandable.

Build Directly With Customers

• Work alongside customers to understand their workflows, prototype solutions, and validate results in their environments.
• Investigate where automation succeeds or fails, then turn those findings into improvements to the core product.
• Help customers move from their first successful workflow toward repeatable, increasingly self-service adoption.
• Partner with forward-deployed engineers and product management to decide which customer needs should shape the roadmap.

Shape Technical Direction & Grow the Team

• Lead architectural decisions across agent execution, backend services, and workflow state, aligning system boundaries and tradeoffs with other technical leads.
• Evaluate model selection, tool use, and context management against reliability, latency, and cost.
• Raise the engineering bar through hands-on implementation, design reviews, and mentoring; help engineers take on broader ownership and participate in hiring.

Requirements

• You've led the architecture and delivery of complex backend systems through deployment, production failures, and subsequent improvements, with impact across multiple components or teams.
• You have hands-on experience shipping and operating LLM-powered systems, and can explain how evaluations and production failures informed your design decisions.
• You can reason through concurrency, persistent state, retries, and partial failures in systems that perform consequential actions.
• You're proficient in Python, Go, Java, or JavaScript/TypeScript.
• You can turn an unclear customer problem into a bounded technical approach, test it with users, and lead it through production while creating capabilities other engineers can build on.
• You want direct customer engagement to be part of your engineering work, including investigating problems and discussing technical tradeoffs.
• You use AI development tools thoughtfully and take responsibility for the correctness, security, and maintainability of what you ship.

Benefits

• Time off programs
• Medical, dental, vision
• Mental health support
• Paid parental leave
• Life and disability insurance
• 401(k)
• Employee stock purchasing program