Principal Operations Engineer

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Job Category

Enterprise Technology & Infrastructure

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.

About the Role

Salesforce's Digital Enterprise Technology organization is building something new: a modern, engineering-first operations function designed to move the entire organization from reactive, manual processes to automated, intelligent, and proactive operations at scale. As a Principal Operations Engineer focused on Operational Excellence, you'll be one of the founding technical leaders of this team — defining how DET detects, responds to, and prevents issues while eliminating toil and raising the reliability bar for critical, customer-facing systems. This is a high-visibility, high-impact role for someone who wants to shape not just what gets built, but how an organization operates.

What You'll Be Doing

Automation & Operational Engineering

• Lead the design and implementation of automation-first operations, eliminating manual workflows across incident management, alerting, escalation, runbooks, and day-to-day operational processes
• Build and scale alert-to-incident automation pipelines to accelerate detection and response times
• Identify and prioritize high-impact toil reduction opportunities across the ecosystem
• Drive adoption of self-healing systems and automated remediation patterns
• Provide Tier 2+ advanced application support for complex production issues and lead deep-dive investigations into system failures
• Drive a culture of automation-first thinking, ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement

Incident, Reliability & Operational Excellence

• Lead the evolution from reactive incident response to proactive reliability engineering, improving MTTD, MTTR, and the percentage of incidents detected automatically
• Serve as a key technical leader in incident management, escalation strategy, and post-incident analysis
• Establish and enforce SLI, SLA, and SLO frameworks across critical Tier-1 services
• Drive deep understanding of system dependencies and failure modes

Customer-Centric Operations

• Architect operational strategies with a focus on customer intent, experience, and outcomes
• Identify and prioritize critical user journeys, ensuring they are observable, reliable, and performant
• Align operational priorities with business impact

Operational Strategy & Roadmap

• Partner with stakeholders to define and execute quarterly and annual operational roadmaps (OKRs)
• Translate business needs into scalable operational capabilities, balancing reliability, speed, and cost efficiency

What We're Looking For

Required Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience in engineering, operations engineering, SRE, or related roles
• Proven track record of automating complex operational workflows and improving reliability and operational maturity at scale
• Deep expertise in incident management systems, observability (metrics, logging, tracing), and distributed systems and microservices
• Strong experience with automation frameworks, scripting, Infrastructure as Code, and modern DevOps practices
• Experience operating high-availability, customer-facing systems in enterprise environments
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to influence senior engineering leaders and drive outcomes across teams without formal authority
• A related technical degree required.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building self-service or platform-based operational tooling
• Background in automation-driven operations or platform engineering
• Experience leading large-scale incident management transformations
• Familiarity with AI/ML-driven operations (AIOps)
• Experience in SaaS/PaaS enterprise environments
• Salesforce ecosystem experience (Apex, LWC, APIs, etc.)

What's in It for You

This is a rare opportunity to build a modern operations discipline from the ground up — not maintain something inherited — with full visibility into engineering leadership and a real mandate to drive change. You'll work alongside strong engineering, SRE, and platform teams on problems that directly affect Salesforce's internal products and customer-facing systems. If you want to do the most technically interesting work of your career while shaping how an entire organization runs, this role is it.

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.

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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.

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.