Principal Member of Technical Staff - Java + Node.Js (GenAI search)

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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.

About the Role

We are looking for an exceptional PMTS / LMTS to lead the engineering vision for AgentExchange’s Search and Personalization services — the AI-powered discovery layer that sits at the heart of how customers find and engage with solutions across the Salesforce ecosystem.

As a Principal Engineer or Lead on the Search & Personalization team, you will be the technical authority for the systems that determine what customers see, find, and click on across AgentExchange. You’ll design and deliver the next generation of agentic search — multi-turn, context-aware, and enriched with AI overviews, next-best query suggestions, and personalized recommendations — alongside the indexing infrastructure and contextual discovery services that power embedded surfaces across Agentforce, Slack, Setup, and beyond.

AgentExchange is building the next generation of our ecosystem marketplace, extending the base and boundaries of our platform while infusing intelligence through every step of our partners’ and customers’ journey. The new ecosystem enables packaging, publishing, and listing solutions across multiple technologies — Agentforce, MuleSoft, Tableau, and Slack — while delivering full transactability (Discover → Purchase → Provision). The One AppExchange Framework is our dynamic, extensible data and services platform that expands the tenancy capabilities of the AgentExchange site.

This is not a search-maintenance role. You will own the technical vision for discovery at scale, drive AI-native engineering across the search stack, and set the bar for relevance, latency, personalization, and observability across one of the most strategically important surfaces in the AgentExchange.

What You’ll Do

• Architectural Leadership: Lead architectural design and delivery of major Search & Personalization capabilities, including:GenAI Search: AI overview results, next-best query suggestions, and natural language query understanding.Multi-Turn Agentic Search: Conversational discovery with recommendations, comparisons, and contextual follow-up.Personalization Service: Behavioral and preference-based ranking and recommendations.Contextual Discovery Service: Powering embedded AgentExchange discovery surfaces within Agentforce, Slack, Setup, and other core product surfaces.Search Indexer: Scalable, low-latency indexing pipelines for new asset types including standards-based agents, MCP tools/resources, skills, subagents, and A2A listings.
• AI-Native Engineering: Champion AI-native engineering — actively use and promote AI tools across the development lifecycle, from code completion to production monitoring. Model AI fluency and help build an AI-native team culture.
• Domain Strategy & Vision: Define the Northstar architecture for the Search & Personalization domain — leading discovery, design, and execution tracks that align with the broader AgentExchange one-marketplace strategy.
• Platform Modernization: Drive platform modernization — contribute to the migration off Heroku and onto Falcon, including the enabling roadmap for search services infrastructure migration.
• Engineering Excellence: Own engineering excellence across the search stack: observability and telemetry (SLOs/SLIs, latency budgets, relevance metrics), safe change practices, 99.95% availability targets, and security risk governance.
• Technical Authority & Mentorship: Act as the technical authority for your domain — providing guidance, mentorship, and sponsorship to senior and junior engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence and bold innovation.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Platform Services, Marketing and Growth, and Embedded Exchanges teams to deliver shared discovery infrastructure, unified catalog indexing, and contextual search surfaces across all AgentExchange touchpoints.
• Culture Carrier: Be a culture carrier — embody our values of Trust, Innovation, Engineering Commitment, and Curiosity. Challenge the status quo and build the best-engineered solutions.

Requirements

• Experience: 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with a demonstrated track record of technical leadership on enterprise-scale search, recommendation, or personalization systems.
• Technical Vision: Proven ability to define and drive long-term technical vision and architectural roadmaps for large, complex search or ML-infused platform domains.
• Search System Expertise: Deep expertise in building and operating search systems at scale:Search Engine Internals: Indexing pipelines, ranking, query understanding, relevance tuning.Search Infrastructure: Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, or equivalent.Back End: Node.js, Java, or equivalent for high-throughput search services.
• Recommendation Systems: Experience designing and delivering recommendation or personalization systems — collaborative filtering, content-based ranking, behavioral signal processing, or equivalent.
• GenAI & LLM Integration: Hands-on experience integrating LLMs or GenAI into search products — AI-generated summaries, query expansion, semantic search, or conversational retrieval.
• Data Pipelines: Experience with real-time and near-real-time data pipelines for indexing and signal ingestion.
• Production Reliability: Strong commitment to engineering excellence: observability, telemetry, latency SLOs, CI/CD, service ownership, safe change practices, and production reliability.
• Communication & Influence: Excellent communication skills — able to influence and build consensus across engineering, product, and executive stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Conversational Search: Experience building multi-turn or conversational search experiences, including context management and session-aware ranking.
• Agentic Systems & MCP: Hands-on experience with agentic systems, MCP tools/resources, or A2A patterns — particularly catalog and metadata requirements for new AI-native asset types.
• Embedded Surfaces: Experience with contextual or embedded discovery surfaces — delivering search within host product surfaces (e.g., in-app, in-builder, in-Slack contexts).
• E-Commerce Search: Familiarity with marketplace or e-commerce search — faceted navigation, intent classification, CTR optimization, and funnel instrumentation.
• Personalization at Scale: Experience with personalization at scale — user modeling, preference inference, A/B experimentation, and behavioral analytics.
• Platform Migrations: Experience with platform infrastructure migrations (e.g., Heroku → cloud-native platforms) and tech stack modernization.
• Security & Governance: Strong security mindset — experience with data governance, access control, and security best practices for search and recommendation systems.
• Salesforce Ecosystem: Conversant with Salesforce Platform features and best practices.
• Mindset & Language: A strong desire to learn technology and a polyglot attitude; proficient in written and spoken English.

Our Engineering Values

We hold ourselves to a high standard — because our partners and customers depend on us:

• Trust by default: Secure, accessible, performant, and scalable in everything we build.
• Engineering Commitment: Observability, performance, and security are first-class citizens, not afterthoughts.
• Curiosity & AI Fluency: We fully embrace AI across our daily engineering chores, from code completion to production monitoring.
• Boldness: We challenge the status quo and build the best-engineered solutions.
• Ownership: We don’t just ship features; we own the full lifecycle, including production.

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

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