Software Engineer – SMTS (Kafka Platform)

About the role

Salesforce is looking for a Senior Member of Technical Staff (SMTS) to join the Ajna team, which builds and operates the internal Kafka‑as‑a‑Service platform. You will work on a critical distributed messaging backbone that powers real‑time data pipelines, alerting, analytics, and event streaming across all major Salesforce products and cloud environments.

Key responsibilities

• Design, develop, debug, and operate highly resilient distributed systems that run at production scale across multiple data centers.
• Deliver cloud‑infrastructure automation tools, frameworks, and validation platforms on public clouds such as AWS, GCP, Azure, or Alibaba Cloud.
• Maintain continuous on‑call coverage, investigate production incidents, and lead systematic root‑cause analysis.
• Contribute to the evolution of the platform’s architecture, ensuring consistency, availability, and multi‑tenant safety.
• Collaborate with internal engineering teams worldwide to provide reliable messaging services.

Required profile

• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems with deep knowledge of Kafka internals (leader election, ISR, consumer groups, log compaction, partition rebalancing).
• Proficiency in Kubernetes engineering, including StatefulSets, autoscaling, PersistentVolumeClaims, and Helm.
• Hands‑on experience with infrastructure‑as‑code using Terraform for cloud resources.
• Solid Java development skills and a focus on clean, performant, and operationally sound code.
• Operational ownership mindset with experience in on‑call rotations and incident investigation.
• Excellent written communication and the ability to produce architectural designs that influence cross‑team decisions.

Required skills

• Kafka
• Kubernetes
• Terraform
• Java
• AWS
• Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
• Microsoft Azure
• Alibaba Cloud