Description

About Salesforce: -

Salesforce has immediate opportunities for software developers who want their lines of code to have significant and measurable positive impact for users, the company's bottom line, and the industry. You will be working with a group of world-class engineers to build the breakthrough features our customers will love, adopt, and use while keeping our trusted CRM platform stable and scalable. The software engineer role at Salesforce encompasses architecture, design, implementation, and testing to ensure we build products right and release them with high quality.

We pride ourselves on writing high quality, maintainable code that strengthens the stability of the product and makes our lives easier. We embrace the hybrid model and celebrate the individual strengths of each team member while cultivating everyone on the team to grow into the best version of themselves. We believe that autonomous teams with the freedom to make decisions will empower the individuals, the product, the company, and the customers they serve to thrive.

About the Role:

The Database engineering team is primarily based in the Bay Area, Toronto and India. The team has the DNA of building highly scalable, distributed and mission critical enterprise products. As part of building our team in India, we are seeking an AI Research Engineer with a passion for advancing the intersection of machine learning and database systems. This role focuses on developing innovative AI-based solutions across multiple core database areas, including but not limited to:

• Root Cause Analysis (RCA) from logs and telemetry

• Query optimization and cost modeling

• Execution plan prediction and tuning

• Log summarization and anomaly detection

• Semantic understanding of user queries and workload forecasting

You’ll work on integrating LLMs and ML models into the core of modern data engines to make them more adaptive, self-healing, and intelligent as well as implementing solutions to improve the quality of the database engine.

Key Research Areas:

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) for Observability Data

• Design LLM-based models to interpret logs, traces, and metrics.

• Correlate system-level events with performance anomalies or errors.

• Build interactive natural language agents for RCA.

AI-Augmented Query Optimization

• Learn and predict better query plans using past workload data.

• Replace or assist cost estimators using ML regression or neural cost models.

• Model cardinality estimation using deep learning or probabilistic methods.

Execution Plan Ranking and Repair

• Use embeddings or graph neural networks (GNNs) on query plans.

• Predict suboptimal patterns in plans and suggest rewrites.

• Create feedback loops between runtime statistics and future planning.

Semantic Query Understanding and Rewriting

• Use LLMs to semantically interpret natural language queries into optimized SQL.

• Translate unstructured BI questions into structured, efficient analytical queries.

Workload Forecasting and Index Recommendation

• Forecast query workloads and recommend physical design changes.

• Use reinforcement learning to adapt system behavior under changing workloads

Responsibilities:

• Prototype and productionize ML/LLM models for core DBMS components.

• Collaborate with systems engineers to integrate AI models into compilers, optimizers, or diagnostics pipelines.

• Conduct experiments and benchmarks using open-source and proprietary datasets.

• Contribute to publications, patents, and open-source projects.

Required Qualifications:

• Ph.D. or Master’s in Computer Science, AI/ML, or related field.

• Strong understanding of database internals: query plans, execution engines, indexes is a plus.

• Hands-on experience with MCP servers, LLMs, transformers, or neural network architectures.

• Proficiency in data engineering tools (e.g., Spark, SQL, Parquet) and ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow).

• Familiarity with query optimizers, costing models, or log analysis frameworks.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with open-source DBMS (PostgreSQL, MySQL) or commercial engines.

• Familiarity with reinforcement learning, autoML, or causal inference for query tuning.

• Exposure to observability platforms (Prometheus, Loki, Jaeger, ELK).

• Background in systems research with published work in SIGMOD, VLDB, NeurIPS, ICDE, OSDI, or similar venues.

BENEFITS & PERKS

* Comprehensive benefits package including well-being reimbursement, generous parental leave, adoption assistance, fertility benefits, and more!

* World-class enablement and on-demand training with Trailhead.com

* Exposure to executive thought leaders and regular 1:1 coaching with leadership

* Volunteer opportunities and participation in our 1:1:1 model for giving back to the community

* For more details, visit https://www.salesforcebenefits.com/

Why Join Us?

• Be at the frontier of AI-infused database systems research.

• Work with experts in systems and database internals.

• Access real-world workloads and logs from large-scale systems.

• Opportunity to publish, patent, and influence the future of autonomous data infrastructure.