Lead Network Engineer - Backbone Engineering

The Experience:
As a Lead Network Engineer at Salesforce, you will be part of the Infrastructure Strategy and Data Center Operations team, a dynamic, global team delivering and supporting technology infrastructure in the Salesforce Global Network to meet the substantial growth needs of the business. In this role, you will collaborate with field teams, vendor sourcing teams, Global Network Operations teams, and application owners who are delivering innovative solutions in an agile, and dynamic environment. A successful candidate will have the ability to communicate and demonstrate both deep and broad knowledge across multiple areas of information technology in support of a SaaS infrastructure. We are looking for enthusiastic technologists who thrive on efficiency by contributing to the development of standards, processes, and automation requirements that lead to operational excellence
The Backbone Engineering team is responsible for network capacity and connectivity strategy for the Salesforce core network, including peering relationships, capacity planning, decision making for new PoP builds. The team is also responsible for the design and maintenance of backbone routing architecture including any automation to make configuration changes easier and more predictable. The Salesforce Backbone is the architecture over which Salesforce customers transit to have access to their Salesforce applications and data. Customer success and trust are beacons for how the team approaches engineering on the Salesforce core network.
What You'll Actually Be Doing:
Act as a liaison with the vendor sourcing team
Helping to develop and maintain metrics on our capacity vendors
Project managing new capacity installs with various teams including sourcing and field engineering
Updating the network and associated datastores for capacity additions and decommissions
Work with various teams to provide feedback, document, and implement various new network designs
Developing in Python, Ansible for network configuration automation
Work with our connectivity partners and customer engagement teams for any customer troubleshooting issues
Help with BGP peering relationship management and peering network design
Backbone router migrations/grooms/decoms
Network design life cycles including documentation and collaborative approvals
Maintaining Network Data SoTs
You're Our Person If You Have:
Minimum 7 years in production network environments, or comparable experience
Proven project management skills
Experience working with telecommunications vendors
Experience with Cisco and Juniper carrier-class routers (ex: ASR9K, CRS, MX960, PTX, MX2K)
Experience with Cisco Nexus-based switches
Knowledge of routing protocols such as BGP and IS-IS
Fundamental understanding of WDM technologies
Strong Python coding skills
Good understanding of Unix/Linux-based operating systems
Experience developing and maintaining network automation tools (e.g. Ansible)
Experience with Git, or other version control systems
The ability to self-manage multiple projects at one time
A good understanding of the current state of AI, machine learning, LLMs, MCP, etc.
A related technical degree required.
Even Better If You Have:
Experience managing co-located infrastructure
Experience with DWDM platforms, preferably Ciena and Cisco DCI
Experience with MACSec encryption
Extensive network troubleshooting and network monitoring skills
Hands-on experience with production hardware life-cycle management
Experience with Puppet, Terraform, Containers, and/or K8S
Familiarity with CI/CD principles
Previous experience with lift and shift backbone router migrations
Experience administering global, web-scale IP Address allocations
Solid understanding of the transit, public peering and SFI spaces
Experience writing prompts against public AI chatbots (ex. ChatGPT, Gemini)
Experience with AI-assisted coding (ex. Cursor, VSCode with AI plugins)
Prior experience with the Salesforce core application, either in a developer or support role

Employment type
Full time