Director, Data and AI Architect

Job description

To get the best candidate experience, please consider applying for a maximum of 3 roles within 12 months to ensure you are not duplicating efforts. Job Category Sales Job Details About Salesforce Salesforce is the #1 AI CRM, where humans with agents drive customer success together. Here, ambition meets action. Tech meets trust. And innovation isn’t a buzzword — it’s a way of life. The world of work as we know it is changing and we're looking for Trailblazers who are passionate about bettering business and the world through AI, driving innovation, and keeping Salesforce's core values at the heart of it all. Ready to level-up your career at the company leading workforce transformation in the agentic era? You’re in the right place! Agentforce is the future of AI, and you are the future of Salesforce. About the Team We are a Data & AI Architects team focused on helping customers understand what this new AI era makes possible, and what it actually takes to make the possible a reality: the right architecture, a trusted data foundation, a clear operating model, and an adoption path that scales. We work in the field, close to customers, close to our Agentforce and Data 360 sellers, and close to Product, Engineering, Support, and delivery teams. We are expected to know the domain, understand the wider ecosystem, bring a strong point of view, and help guide the architectural decisions that turn AI ambition into trusted business outcomes. The team brings together architects with deep expertise across enterprise data, applied AI, and the wider technology ecosystem. They love hard problems, think in systems, and help customers understand how the landscape fits together and where Salesforce creates the most leverage. About the Role As Director, Data & AI Architect , you will lead and develop a team of senior Data & AI Architects who help customers make consequential architecture decisions across Salesforce and the broader enterprise data and AI ecosystem. This is both a people leadership and architecture leadership role. You will build exceptional technical talent, set a high standard for architectural judgment, and create the environment in which architects can do their best work. You will remain close enough to the technology and customer work to coach, challenge, and improve the quality of the team's recommendations. You will help customers and their leaders translate Data and AI ambition into practical architectures, trusted foundations, and measurable business outcomes. You will also help the team turn what it learns in the field into reusable patterns, stronger points of view, and better ways of working at scale. What You'll Do Build, lead, and develop a high performing team of Data & AI Architects with deep domain expertise, strong systems judgment, and the ability to influence technical and executive audiences. Build a balanced team with deep expertise across enterprise data architecture and applied AI. Set hiring and development standards based on the systems candidates and architects have personally designed, decisions they owned, and outcomes they delivered, not certifications or product familiarity alone. Set clear architectural principles and quality standards across enterprise data, AI, integration, identity, security, governance, trust, scale, and production readiness. Stay close to strategic customer work. Review architectures, challenge assumptions, coach through tradeoffs, and help the team turn complex customer problems into clear and actionable recommendations. Serve as a trusted technical executive for priority customers, helping CDOs, CIOs, CTOs, enterprise architects, and engineering leaders make sound decisions across Salesforce and their broader technology landscape. Partner with Sales and Solution Engineering leaders to focus the team's expertise on the customer problems and opportunities where deep architectural involvement can create the greatest impact. Work closely with Product, Engineering, Support, delivery teams, and partners to represent customer needs, improve product and field strategy, and increase the likelihood that technical decisions lead to successful adoption. Connect architecture to business value. Ensure the team can explain the customer problem, the expected outcome, the major decisions and risks, and why the recommended approach is worth pursuing. Turn field learning into reusable reference architectures, technical patterns, customer stories, enablement, and product feedback that extend the team's impact. Build a culture of curiosity, experimentation, and continuous learning. Encourage architects to remain hands on, explore emerging technologies, and separate durable architecture from short lived hype. Use AI to improve how the team researches, designs, validates, communicates, and captures knowledge while maintaining strong human judgment and accountability. Drive operational rigor and measurable outcomes across customer impact, architectural quality, team development, reuse, adoption, and revenue influence. What You'll Bring You are a people builder and architecture leader. You know how to create clarity for senior technical talent without reducing complex work to a script. You can coach an architect through the mechanics of a design, help an executive understand the business decision behind it, and know when the evidence is not yet strong enough. You stay close enough to the work to coach, review, and challenge senior architects. You bring credible architectural judgment across enterprise data platforms, identity and governance, applied AI and agent systems, interoperability patterns across agents, tools, data, and enterprise applications, and how these capabilities activate through Salesforce, including Data 360, Agentforce, and CRM. You can lead architecture conversations across platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, and the major hyperscalers, evaluate system boundaries and tradeoffs, and know when deeper specialist expertise is required. You lead with trust, directness, and sound judgment. You are comfortable making decisions in ambiguity, challenging weak assumptions, and helping a team raise its technical and customer impact over time. Qualifications 10 or more years of experience in technical architecture, enterprise architecture, solution architecture, field engineering, customer engineering, or solution engineering in complex enterprise environments. Demonstrated success leading, hiring, developing, and retaining senior customer facing architects or equivalent technical professionals. A track record of shaping enterprise Data and AI strategy, evaluating architectural choices, and connecting customer needs to technology decisions. Strong understanding of enterprise data, AI, integration, identity, governance, security, privacy, trust, and platform architecture concepts and patterns. Experience guiding architecture across multiple platforms and determining how systems, data, agents, workflows, and teams should work together. The technical credibility to review senior architects' work, pressure test assumptions, and discuss system mechanics, tradeoffs, failure modes, and production implications. Proven ability to engage and influence CDOs, CIOs, CTOs, enterprise architects, engineering leaders, sellers, partners, and delivery stakeholders. Experience working across Sales, Product, Engineering, Support, delivery, and customer teams to move solutions from strategy to execution and adoption. Strong written and verbal communication, with the ability to distill complex technical ideas without removing important nuance or uncertainty. Demonstrated curiosity and learning velocity in emerging technologies, especially across AI, data, automation, and agentic systems. A record of linking technical excellence to measurable customer outcomes, adoption, team capability, and business impact. Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Data Science, another STEM field, or equivalent work experience. Graduate study is a plus. Helpful Experience We care most about leadership, architectural judgment, learning velocity, and customer impact. Relevant experience may include: Salesforce Data 360, Agentforce, CRM, MuleSoft, Tableau, Informatica, or the broader Salesforce Platform. Modern data platforms and hyperscaler ecosystems, including Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, or Redshift. Applied AI and agent systems, including governance, evaluation, observability, enterprise automation, and interoperability across agents, tools, data, and applications. Building architecture practices, reusable technical standards, talent programs, or communities of experts across distributed organizations. Reviewing prototypes, proofs of concept, reference architectures, and technical evaluations to improve architecture decisions. Partnering with systems integrators, independent software vendors, and technology partners on complex customer solutions. The Leader Who Thrives Here You will thrive as part of our team if you love hard problems and enjoy helping talented people become even better. You seek to understand customers' real problems, not just their stated requirements. You are curious about how organizations work, where data and processes break down, where AI can create leverage, and what it takes to turn a promising idea into a trusted business outcome. You bring a clear point of view without pretending there is only one right answer. You can go deep without getting lost and wide without getting shallow. You are excited about AI while remaining grounded in trusted data, strong architecture, governance, adoption, and demonstrable value. Most importantly, you build teams that customers trust, technical people want to join, and the broader organization learns from. Unleash Your Potential When you join Salesforce, you’ll be limitless in all areas of your life. Our benefits and resources support you to find balance and be your best , and our AI agents accelerate your impact so you can do your best . Together, we’ll bring the power of Agentforce to organizations of all sizes and deliver amazing experiences that customers love. Apply today to not only shape the future — but to redefine what’s possible — for yourself, for AI, and the world. Accommodations If you need a reasonable accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please submit a request via this Accommodations Request Form . Please note that Salesforce uses artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help our recruiters assess and evaluate candidates’ resumes and qualifications throughout the recruiting process. Humans will always make any candidate selection and hiring decisions. Please see our Candidate Privacy Statement for more information about how we use your personal data and your rights, including with regard to use of AI tools and opt out options. Posting Statement Salesforce is an equal opportunity employer and maintains a policy of non-discrimination with all employees and applicants for employment. What does that mean exactly? It means that at Salesforce, we believe in equality for all. And we believe we can lead the path to equality in part by creating a workplace that’s inclusive, and free from discrimination. Know your rights: workplace discrimination is illegal. Any employee or potential employee will be assessed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications – without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression or identity, transgender status, age, disability, veteran or marital status, political viewpoint, or other classifications protected by law. This policy applies to current and prospective employees, no matter where they are in their Salesforce employment journey. It also applies to recruiting, hiring, job assignment, compensation, promotion, benefits, training, assessment of job performance, discipline, termination, and everything in between. Recruiting, hiring, and promotion decisions at Salesforce are fair and based on merit. 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