TL;DR

Lead AI Engineer, Agent Systems (AI): Designing and building production-grade AI agent systems that translate cutting-edge research into scalable, reliable platform capabilities with an accent on agent orchestration, tool integration, and runtime control. Focus on making AI agents robust, observable, and controllable in real-world environments and driving architectural decisions across AI services.

Location: Must be based in Palo Alto, San Francisco, or Los Angeles, California, USA

Company

Salesforce is seeking a Lead AI Engineer for its AI Research Incubation Team to build next-generation AI agent systems and operationalize cutting-edge AI research.

What you will do

  • Design and build AI agent systems, including lifecycle management, orchestration, and execution control.
  • Develop scalable pipelines for tool invocation, agent planning, memory, and state management.
  • Collaborate with AI researchers to operationalize research outputs into reliable agent behaviors.
  • Define and enforce best practices for agent reliability, safety, observability, and cost control.
  • Lead the design of APIs and services supporting agent runtime and coordination.
  • Drive architectural decisions for agent frameworks and integrations across AI services.

Requirements

  • Must have a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
  • 5+ years of experience in backend or distributed systems engineering with increasing technical ownership.
  • Strong proficiency in Python, with experience designing complex backend services.
  • Experience building production systems involving LLMs, AI services, or agent-like workflows.
  • Deep understanding of RESTful APIs, service-oriented architectures, and system scalability.
  • Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP) and containerized environments (Docker, Kubernetes).

Nice to have

  • Hands-on experience with AI agent frameworks, workflow engines, or orchestration systems.
  • Familiarity with RAG systems, vector databases, or memory architectures.
  • Experience implementing safety guardrails, policy enforcement, or AI observability.
  • Exposure to event-driven architectures and message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ).

Culture & Benefits

  • Build next-generation AI agent systems in collaboration with world-class AI researchers.
  • Own core agent infrastructure that directly shapes how AI is used across products.
  • Work on complex, high-impact systems at the frontier of applied AI.
  • Competitive compensation, benefits, and strong career growth opportunities.