Software Engineering Principal Architect

Salesforce

Principal Architect leading design and evolution of scalable distributed systems at Salesforce. Responsible for transactional and compute architecture and ensuring operational excellence at enterprise scale.

Posted 4/8/2026full-timeSan Francisco • California, Washington • 🇺🇸 United StatesLead💰 $257,500 - $451,700 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

Distributed SystemsJavaKubernetesLinuxUnix

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Design and evolve highly scalable, resilient, and fault-tolerant transactional and distributed system architectures
Provide architectural leadership for transactional storage and compute, including metadata, logs, and database compute layers
Drive automation and operational excellence through control-plane-driven architectures
Ensure systems meet strict Trust SLAs for availability, reliability, scalability, and self-healing
Collaborate across engineering, operations, and product teams to align architecture with business and platform goals
Use telemetry and metrics to guide design decisions and continuous improvement
Mentor senior engineers while remaining open to learning and feedback
Contribute hands-on when needed, including design reviews, code reviews, and critical implementations

Requirements

What you’ll need

Proven experience designing and building scalable, resilient, and fault-tolerant transactional and distributed systems in enterprise production environments
Strong leadership and communication skills, with the ability to influence across teams and levels
Highly inventive, pragmatic, and delivery-focused, with a track record of incremental, on-time execution
Expert-level Kubernetes, Java development experience in Unix/Linux environments
Deep understanding of object-oriented programming, modern design patterns, and system architecture principles
Strong experience using telemetry, metrics, and observability to drive operational excellence
High engineering rigor, including writing functional and unit tests and participating in peer code reviews
Experience working in Agile development environments with a commitment to continuous improvement
20+ years of professional experience, or a Master’s degree in a relevant field with 12+ years of professional experience
Experience with relational databases is a strong plus

Benefits

Comp & perks

time off programs
medical
dental
vision
mental health support
paid parental leave
life and disability insurance
401(k)
employee stock purchasing program

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

KubernetesJavaobject-oriented programmingdesign patternssystem architecturetelemetrymetricsobservabilityfunctional testingunit testing

Soft Skills

leadershipcommunicationinfluencepragmaticdelivery-focusedincremental executionmentoringcollaborationopenness to feedbackcommitment to continuous improvement

Certifications

Master’s degree in relevant field