Principal Architect, AI Labs
Software Engineering, IT, Data Science
San Francisco, CA, USA
Posted on Oct 17, 2026
AI Labs aims to grow Salesforce into America’s next $1.5T AI mainstay, from ASICs to Agents. We’re looking for deeply technical, product-savvy AI architects who can operate across two critical moments in the deal lifecycle: evaluating AI technology before it is acquired, licensed, or invested in by a larger firm, and accelerating that company after acquisition.
These leaders will provide independent, in-IDE technical depth during M&A or investment diligence, while helping build common DeepTech capabilities, models, and infrastructure that portfolio companies can leverage after joining AI Labs.
What You'll Do
- Lead technical and AI diligence for potential acquisitions and strategic investments. (Formal diligence experience is not required.)
- Critically evaluate (by testing, studying, using, and remixing) architecture, models, data strategy, infrastructure, security, scalability, technical differentiation, and technical debt.
- Interview and score DeepTech talent.
- Assess build-vs-buy questions and the defensibility of a company's underlying technology, team, and IP.
- Partner directly with founders, CTOs, and engineering leaders during diligence.
- Identify material technical risks and opportunities and translate them into clear recommendations for AI Labs leadership.
- Identify opportunities for portfolio companies to adopt shared AI technologies, evaluation frameworks, infrastructure, standards, and services, only where doing so creates material leverage.
- Identify capabilities that should be built once across AI Labs, rather than repeatedly by individual companies, and the technical and nontechnical tradeoffs.
- Serve as a senior technical advisor across the AI Labs portfolio without becoming a centralized bottleneck.
What We're Looking For
- Principal/Distinguished-level engineering or architecture experience in AI (both basic and applied), ML, and production-scale AI products.
- Deep understanding of modern AI architectures, models, training/post-training and inference, data, evaluation, infrastructure, production systems, and how technical choices shape product outcomes.
- Ability to rapidly understand unfamiliar technical stacks and distinguish true technical differentiation from implementation detail.
- Experience working with startup/founder-led engineering teams.
- Strong technical judgment combined with deep product taste and pragmatic business thinking.
- Experience with technical diligence, DeepTech investing, acquisitions, or startup evaluation is nice to have. (Having shipped differentiated AI/ML products matters more.)
Team Values
- Distill
- Always be learning
- Invest in relationships
- Bravery without bravado