Director of Software Engineering - Big Data Platform & Storage

About the Role

Join Salesforce's Big Data team as an engineering leader spearheading the design, implementation, deployment, and operation of our expansive big data storage platforms. These platforms operate both within our own data centers and public cloud infrastructures like AWS and GCP, supporting massive scale enterprise applications. Our team is innovating the future of trusted enterprise cloud storage with an AI-first, agile mindset.

You will lead two impactful engineering groups: BigData @Scale - Data Management and BigData @Scale - System of Record (SOR). These teams maintain Salesforce’s multi-petabyte HBase infrastructure that underpins critical services such as large-scale organizational migrations, backup and restore processes, data lifecycle management, and system-of-record reliability across numerous global production clusters.

Key Responsibilities

• Foster an AI-driven team culture by encouraging engineers to leverage AI tools for research, prototyping, and daily development tasks.
• Advocate for AI-assisted development processes including use of AI coding assistants to speed up feature creation, code reviews, automated testing, and documentation.
• Collaborate to identify and automate frequent operational tasks like on-call runbooks, day 2 operations, and monitoring with AI support.
• Define and execute your teams’ vision emphasizing AI integration, customer success, feature delivery, service ownership, availability, scalability, and user convenience.
• Act as a subject matter expert in distributed systems, big data compute/storage architectures, and associated technologies.
• Lead and grow engineering teams to deliver highly reliable, scalable, and secure big data services addressing diverse business requirements.
• Drive project delivery through cross-functional collaboration with architects, product owners, and engineers.
• Implement engineering best practices and tooling enhancements to boost CI/CD pipelines and code quality standards.
• Mentor and coach engineers and technical leads, investing in continuous professional development.
• Prioritize employee wellbeing and demonstrate empathetic leadership.
• Recruit and retain top engineering talent to strengthen the team.

Required Qualifications and Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• Over 12 years of software development experience, including at least 3 years in managerial roles leading teams.
• Proven experience in recruiting and developing high-performing teams.
• In-depth knowledge of distributed systems, NoSQL databases, and big data processing methodologies.
• Hands-on experience building and operating large-scale services on public cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Familiarity with open-source big data technologies including Phoenix, HBase, Hadoop, Kafka, MongoDB, Spark, Presto, Hive, and Airflow.
• Strong leadership skills with ability to mentor and guide technical teams effectively.
• Customer-focused mindset and dedication to enabling others’ success.
• Experience establishing and managing service-level objectives (SLOs) and service-level agreements (SLAs) with an emphasis on service ownership.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.