Senior/Lead Engineer, Performance Engineering

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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.

Senior/Lead Performance Engineer, Distributed Database Systems

The Experience

Do you specialize in systems performance? Do you love working with data and automation? Want to be part of something big? Help build the distributed database technology that powers the growth of the Salesforce Platform worldwide.

SalesforceDB is the transactional database behind Salesforce CRM. It runs more than 1.1 trillion transactions per month on thousands of database instances.

The Salesforce Database team is fast-paced and collaborative. We work across all areas of our distributed transactional database technology stack. We are seeking performance engineers to deliver the tools, analysis, and optimizations that take SalesforceDB to new levels of performance and scalability with every release.

Our performance engineers partner closely with database and storage system developers, application performance engineers, infrastructure engineers, and our analytics team. Together, we deliver all the pieces that add up to high performance in production at scale. Your improvements ship across the whole production fleet every release. Some of our work is published at database research conferences such as CIDR. We are a high-performing team with high standards. We value integrity, rigor, and continuous learning.

What You'll Do

• Drive the design and scalability of our database stack with development teams, from research and conception through delivery in production.

• Find optimization opportunities by profiling the database engine and storage service. Help us meet the performance and scale needs of our largest customers and newly onboarded applications.

• Identify the root cause of performance and scalability problems. Then fix them yourself or drive the fix with the owning team.

• Lead benchmarking and modeling that guide hardware selection and capacity planning for the fleet.

• Build the telemetry, dashboards, and analysis that show how the production fleet performs against its targets.

• Own performance qualification of SalesforceDB releases. Build and run the workloads and benchmarks that decide whether a release goes to production.

You May Be a Great Fit If You Have

• A related technical degree, or equivalent experience.

• 5+ years of performance engineering on systems software, ideally databases, storage, or distributed systems.

• Strong computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and memory management.

• Strong coding skills in Java or C/C++.

• Practical experience with load, benchmark, and regression testing, ideally for multi-tenant workloads at scale.

• A track record of root cause analysis for performance and scalability problems in complex distributed systems.

• Strong SQL and performance data analysis skills (CPU, latency, throughput, per-tenant resource use).

• Experience with telemetry, dashboards, and monitoring against performance targets.

• Fluency with Linux, OS internals, and shell/Python scripting.

• Clear communication and collaboration skills across database, storage, infrastructure, application performance, and analytics teams.

• Integrity and a growth mindset: you report what the data shows, seek feedback, and keep learning.

Additional Qualifications That Could Set You Apart

• MS or PhD in databases or distributed systems.

• Deep knowledge of database internals: optimizer, query execution, storage, transactions, and concurrency control.

• SQL query optimization.

• Splunk or similar log analytics for performance monitoring.

• Java and C/C++ profiling, JVM tuning, and heap dump analysis.

• Statistical analysis and experimental design.

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 $148,500 - $260,100 annually. In select cities within the San Francisco and New York City metropolitan area, the base salary range for this role is $178,900 - $285,800 annually.

The range represents base salary only, and does not include company bonus, incentive for sales roles, equity or benefits, as applicable.