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Job Category
Software EngineeringJob 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.
About the Team
Want to work on some of the hardest database scalability and query optimization problems in the industry?
Salesforce's Core Query Services (CQS) team builds the query infrastructure that powers Salesforce's multi-tenant platform. Our systems sit on the critical path of every Salesforce application and influence 250B+ database queries every day across globally distributed infrastructure. A 1% improvement in CPU, latency, or plan quality translates into meaningful savings and better customer experience at a scale few engineering organizations ever encounter.
Operating a multi-tenant database platform at Salesforce scale presents problems that traditional relational databases were never designed to solve. The underlying database optimizer does not inherently understand Salesforce concepts such as tenant-specific schemas, sharing and visibility models, custom metadata, per-tenant data distributions, or application-level access patterns.
Our team builds the intelligence that bridges that gap — dynamic query generation, cost-based optimization, statistics and cardinality intelligence, plan management, indexing strategy, performance diagnostics, and automated detection and remediation of query regressions.
If you enjoy solving technically deep problems where small improvements have outsized impact, we'd love to talk.
What You'll Do
- Design and build query infrastructure that operates safely across massive, diverse multi-tenant workloads — from architecture through implementation, rollout, and long-term operation.
- Develop algorithms and systems for query generation, planning, indexing, statistics, and execution that improve performance, scalability, and resource efficiency.
- Analyze production telemetry at scale to identify performance patterns, regressions, and systemic improvement opportunities — then turn those insights into durable platform features.
- Build observability, diagnostics, and automation that make complex database performance problems easier to detect, understand, and resolve — including AI-assisted tooling for engineers and operators.
- Ship with production discipline: feature configs, staggered rollouts, AB validation, and system monitoring. The org holds a zero-regression bar, and every engineer owns it.
- Own SLA/SLO and on-call rotations for the systems you build, and investigate cross-stack production issues spanning application logic, query generation, database behavior, and infrastructure.
- Partner across teams — database, runtime, platform, and application — to solve performance and scalability problems that span the stack, and contribute to the technical direction of Salesforce's next generation of query infrastructure.
Who You Are
You enjoy problems where databases, algorithms, distributed systems, and production software intersect. You dig deep into complex systems, form hypotheses from data, and design solutions that address root causes — not symptoms. You care about high-quality software and about the operational discipline required to run it safely at massive scale: reliability, observability, incremental rollout, and clear ownership.
You thrive with significant autonomy and expect to influence both technical direction and execution.
Required Qualifications
- Strong software engineering experience in Java or another modern object-oriented language.
- Strong understanding of relational databases and SQL, and comfort reasoning about query behavior.
- Solid foundation in data structures, algorithms, and complexity analysis.
- Experience designing or operating high-scale, performance-sensitive production systems.
- Ability to debug complex problems across multiple layers of a software stack using metrics, profiling, telemetry, and experimentation.
- Ability to design solutions that can be delivered safely and incrementally in large-scale production.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills — you can explain complex technical concepts clearly and influence decisions across teams.
- High ownership, quick learning, and comfort operating in a dynamic engineering environment.
Desired Qualifications
Experience in one or more of the following is highly desirable:
- Query optimizer internals and cost-based optimization
- Indexing and physical database design
- Multi-tenant SaaS platforms operating at large scale
- Query plan management — hinting, plan stability, plan search
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 $117,200 - $223,900 annually. In select cities within the San Francisco and New York City metropolitan area, the base salary range for this role is $41,200 - $246,000 annually. The range represents base salary only, and does not include company bonus, incentive for sales roles, equity or benefits, as applicable.Skills Required
- Strong software engineering experience in Java or another modern object-oriented language
- Strong understanding of relational databases and SQL, including query behavior
- Solid foundation in data structures, algorithms, and complexity analysis
- Experience designing or operating high-scale, performance-sensitive production systems
- Ability to debug complex problems across software stack layers using metrics, profiling, telemetry, and experimentation
- Ability to design solutions for safe, incremental delivery in large-scale production
- Strong written and verbal communication skills
- High ownership, quick learning, and comfort operating in a dynamic engineering environment
- Experience with query optimizer internals and cost-based optimization
- Experience with indexing and physical database design
- Experience with large-scale multi-tenant SaaS platforms
- Experience with query plan management, including hinting, plan stability, or plan search
Salesforce Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Salesforce and has not been reviewed or approved by Salesforce.
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Fair & Transparent Compensation — Pay is positioned as above-market in the U.S., with multiple peer-reported benchmarks converging around a similar median total compensation figure. Compensation is also framed as broadly viewed as fair in aggregate, even while acknowledging variation by role and group.
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Parental & Family Support — Parental leave is described as notably generous for U.S. caregivers, with additional supports like gradual return-to-work and doula reimbursement. Family-building programs are also emphasized through fertility/adoption/surrogacy support with sizeable reimbursement limits.
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Wellbeing & Lifestyle Benefits — Mental-health and coaching offerings are highlighted as accessible supports alongside financial-wellbeing tools. Volunteer Time Off and donation matching are presented as distinctive lifestyle-aligned benefits that add value beyond cash compensation.
Salesforce Insights
What We Do
Salesforce is the #1 AI CRM, where Humans with agents drive customer success together. Through Agentforce, our groundbreaking suite of customizable agents and tools, Salesforce brings autonomous AI agents, unified data from any source, and best-in-class Customer 360 apps together on one integrated platform to help companies connect with customers in a whole new way. Salesforce is democratizing AI agents for businesses of every size and industry so every company can embrace a workforce without limits. Our low code, open, and secure platform helps companies build and customize Salesforce fast so they can safely scale AI-powered work to every customer and employee experience and transform their business. Salesforce is proud to be the market leader, but we’re even more proud to lead in philanthropy, innovation and culture. Guided by core values of trust, customer success, innovation, equality, and sustainability, Salesforce is more than a business — we’re a platform for change.
Why Work With Us
There’s no typical day in the life of a Salesforce employee. You could be transforming our next AI innovation — or transforming your community. Closing deals — or closing your laptop for a day of Volunteer Time Off. Driving change for our customers — or driving change within one of our high-performing teams.
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