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Salesforce

Software Engineering - Principal

Salesforce is hiring a Software Engineering - Principal in San Francisco, United States. It pays $197k-$314k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Salesforce.

Level's read on this job

  • Level rates this role Uses AI ●●○○: an ordinary role that requires AI tools.
  • The posting mentions OpenAI, Claude and Copilot among its tools and skills.
  • Level classes it as a lead role.
  • Salesforce has 1,500+ other open roles on Level.
  • Posted in the last few days.

AI in this role

openaiclaudecopilotopenai-apicursorwindsurfclaude-codecodex
prompt-engineeringai-agents

To get the best candidate experience, please consider applying for a maximum of 3 roles within 12 months to ensure you are not duplicating efforts.

Job Category

Software Engineering

Job Details

About Salesforce

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.

Ready to level-up your career at the company leading workforce transformation in the agentic era? You’re in the right place! Agentforce is the future of AI, and you are the future of Salesforce.

The Experience

Salesforce has opportunities for experienced software developers who want their lines of code to have significant and measurable positive impact for users, the company's bottom line, and the industry. You will be working with a group of world-class engineers to build the breakthrough features our customers will love, adopt, and use while keeping our trusted CRM platform stable and scalable.

The software engineer role at Salesforce encompasses architecture, design, implementation, and testing to ensure we build products right and release them with high quality. Equally important is advanced prompt engineering — the ability to write precise, structured prompts and cultivate the system context that makes AI outputs reliable, secure, and production-ready.

We pride ourselves on writing high quality, maintainable code that strengthens the stability of the product and makes our lives easier. We embrace the hybrid model and celebrate the individual strengths of each team member while cultivating everyone on the team to grow into the best version of themselves. We believe that autonomous teams with the freedom to make decisions will empower the individuals, the product, the company, and the customers they serve to thrive.

What You'll Actually Be Doing


  • Backend application development for Marketing/Commerce/Sales/Big Data/Service/Einstein/MuleSoft/Platform/Industries Clouds/Slack and Heroku
  • Design, implement, and tune robust APIs and API framework related features that perform and scale in a multi-tenant environment.
  • Experience handling large data sets in the cloud (e.g. GCP, AWS, Alibaba and/or Azure platforms)
  • Integration with internal/external systems
  • Test driven development practices as well as CI/CD tools and its usage
  • Build and ship high-quality, production-grade software using modern engineering practices, with AI as a core part of your development workflow by pushing the boundaries of AI development tools (Cursor, Windsurf, Claude, OpenAI API) to deliver secure, optimized, and high-quality code.
  • Design and orchestrate complex systems where AI agents integrate seamlessly into human workflows, driving efficiency and innovation at scale.
  • Contribute to building and maintaining the shared system context, an explicit repository of system designs, constraints, and standards that enables AI to operate accurately and reliably.
  • Critically evaluate code (Human or AI-generated) for correctness, quality, security, and performance
  • For Big Data roles: Working with Phoenix, HBase, MapReduce, Yarn, Kafka, Spark, Hive, Presto, or equivalent large-scale distributed systems technologies on a modern containerized deployment stack



You're Our Person If...


  • A related technical degree required
  • 10+ years backend software development experience
  • Deep knowledge of object oriented programming languages: Java, C++, Go, C#, Ruby, Scala, Python, Node.JS, or JavaScript
  • Broad knowledge of web standards relating to APIs such as REST, SOAP, XML, WSDL, HTTP, JSON, etc.
  • Experience with Spring, gRPC, REST and the HTTP protocol
  • Experience with Agile development methodology
  • A demonstrated, genuine AI-first approach to engineering. Using AI to move faster, build fluency across the stack, and contribute well beyond your core specialty.
  • Experience using AI tools (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex, Cursor, etc.) in development workflows
  • Advanced prompt engineering skills and the ability to write precise, structured prompts and cultivate the system context that makes AI outputs reliable, secure, and production-ready.
  • Participate in the team's on-call rotation to address complex problems in real-time and keep services operational and highly available

Unleash Your Potential

When you join Salesforce, you’ll be limitless in all areas of your life. Our benefits and resources support you to find balance and be your best, and our AI agents accelerate your impact so you can do your best. Together, we’ll bring the power of Agentforce to organizations of all sizes and deliver amazing experiences that customers love. Apply today to not only shape the future — but to redefine what’s possible — for yourself, for AI, and the world.

Accommodations

If you need a reasonable accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please submit a request via this Accommodations Request Form.

Please note that Salesforce uses artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help our recruiters assess and evaluate candidates’ resumes and qualifications throughout the recruiting process. Humans will always make any candidate selection and hiring decisions. Please see our Candidate Privacy Statement for more information about how we use your personal data and your rights, including with regard to use of AI tools and opt out options.

Posting Statement

Salesforce is an equal opportunity employer and maintains a policy of non-discrimination with all employees and applicants for employment. What does that mean exactly? It means that at Salesforce, we believe in equality for all. And we believe we can lead the path to equality in part by creating a workplace that’s inclusive, and free from discrimination. Know your rights: workplace discrimination is illegal. Any employee or potential employee will be assessed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications – without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression or identity, transgender status, age, disability, veteran or marital status, political viewpoint, or other classifications protected by law. This policy applies to current and prospective employees, no matter where they are in their Salesforce employment journey. It also applies to recruiting, hiring, job assignment, compensation, promotion, benefits, training, assessment of job performance, discipline, termination, and everything in between. Recruiting, hiring, and promotion decisions at Salesforce are fair and based on merit. The same goes for compensation, benefits, promotions, transfers, reduction in workforce, recall, training, and education.

In the United States, compensation offered will be determined by factors such as location, job level, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Certain roles may be eligible for incentive compensation, equity, and benefits. Salesforce offers a variety of benefits to help you live well including: time off programs, medical, dental, vision, mental health support, paid parental leave, life and disability insurance, 401(k), and an employee stock purchasing program. More details about company benefits can be found at the following link: https://www.salesforcebenefits.com.Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring, Salesforce will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

At Salesforce, we believe in equitable compensation practices that reflect the dynamic nature of labor markets across various regions. The typical base salary range for this position is $197,300 - $313,700 annually. In select cities within the San Francisco and New York City metropolitan area, the base salary range for this role is $237,700 - $344,700 annually. The range represents base salary only, and does not include company bonus, incentive for sales roles, equity or benefits, as applicable.

How we rate this

Software Engineering - Principal at Salesforce rates 49 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Uses AI (AI Level 2 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Uses AI. An ordinary role that requires AI tools.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

Prompt engineeringAI agentsOpenAIClaudeCopilotOpenAI APICursorWindsurf

Questions you could be asked

  1. How do you structure and test a prompt to get consistent output from a language model?
  2. How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
  3. What are the limits of OpenAI that you've run into, and how did you work around them?
  4. What's a project where you used Claude hands-on?
  5. Walk me through how you've used Copilot in your day-to-day work.

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: Prompt engineering, AI agents, OpenAI, Claude, and Copilot. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
  • Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
  • Put the AI tool in a bullet point about what you did, not just in a skills list. This role treats it as a required part of the job.

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