Forward Deployed Engineer (Mid/Senior Level)
Posted 5 days ago
The role in short
Design, build, and deploy production-grade agentic AI solutions and integrations directly within enterprise customer environments.
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.
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.
Job Description
We are Salesforce, the Customer Company, inspiring the future of business with AI + Data + CRM. Leading with our core values, we help companies across every industry blaze new trails and connect with customers in a whole new way. And, we empower you to be a Trailblazer too, driving your performance and career growth, charting new paths, and improving the state of the world. If you believe in business as the greatest platform for change and in companies doing well and doing good, you've come to the right place.
About the Role
Production experience required. Builder mindset non-negotiable.
Salesforce is hiring Forward Deployed Engineers — experienced Technical Builders who design, build, and deploy agentic AI solutions directly inside enterprise customer environments. You'll work as part of a delivery team, partnering closely with a Deployment Strategist (Strategic Builder - a customer-facing advisor who shapes AI strategy and drives adoption) to co-build solutions that go live in production environments from day one. Engagements range from a single large strategic customer to multiple accounts simultaneously. The common thread is real code, real environments, and measurable business impact. This work spans configuration, customization, and full-stack deployment — shipping solutions customers depend on.
The Builder Experience
- AI-Powered Development: Ship real customer solutions, supported by best-in-class AI tools — Cursor, Claude, and Salesforce coding products like Vibes — embedded into your day-to-day workflow.
- Collaborative Delivery: You'll work alongside Senior Forward Deployed Engineers and a Deployment Strategist. You'll own real components, benefit from structured mentorship from people who've shipped agentic systems at scale, and have a clear path to leading complex deliveries yourself.
- Frontier Access: Our agentic AI platform is evolving in real time. You'll work on capabilities most engineers won't touch for months — spanning Agentforce, data, platform, Slack and headless architectures and your field insight will feed directly to the product teams building them.
- Continuous Innovation: You'll be expected to stay at the forefront, experimenting with emerging AI tools, models, and frameworks, and sharing what you learn with your team and customers.
What You'll Actually Be Building
- Develop AI agents and experiences that take real actions for real organizations. Our solutions are in production at some of the largest enterprises on the planet. The work matters because the customers depend on it.
- Design agent intelligence: prompts, reasoning, tool calls, and integration with customer systems, leveraging our Agentic AI platform and current LLM techniques.
- Design secure authentication and authorization mechanisms using OAuth, SSO, enterprise identity providers, and API gateways.
- Own technical components end-to-end: from architecture choice to deployed, validated, and observable in production.
- Build and integrate data pipelines on Salesforce Data 360, Snowflake, Databricks, and customer data platforms. Model the data, ship the pipeline, validate the output
- Build and maintain agent performance dashboards and customer KPI reporting to track deployment health and business outcomes.
- Contribute to proofs-of-concept and MVPs that move from sketch to deployable in days, not months.
- Co-build alongside customers and partners, sharing best practices and enablement as you go. Leaving teams more capable after each engagement than before.
- Surface platform gaps, edge cases, and field insights to senior Engineers and the product team. Your real-world experience is the product feedback loop.
- Partner with the Deployment Strategist in your pod to translate customer business challenges into agentic solutions that actually ship.
You're Our Forward Deployed Engineer If…
- You have 3+ years (6-10 years for Senior levels) of software engineering or technical delivery experience, with at least one production system you'd be proud to walk us through - ideally in an AI tech stack, full-stack development, or working with frontier models
- You have a degree in Computer Science or a related field
- You have prior customer-facing technical delivery experience (consulting, professional services, or forward deployed engineering) — this is a requirement, not a nice-to-have.
- You're fluent in at least one of Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, or Apex — and willing to add to that list as the work demands.
- You bring deep hands-on expertise with Slack platform architecture: integrating Slack APIs (Web, Events, Bolt framework), managing complex enterprise authentication flows, and building/extending Slackbot systems as both MCP Clients and Servers.
- You've been hands-on with LLMs and prompt engineering. You can explain why a prompt failed and what you'd change.
- You understand data modeling, APIs, and integration patterns deeply enough to design them, not just consume them.
- You can hold your own in a room with sales teams and customer architects.
- You ship quality code and evaluate AI outputs with engineering rigor.
- You actively tinker with the evolving AI/data landscape — piloting new tools, experimenting with new models, and staying genuinely curious about what's coming next.
- You thrive in the group chat that's building something, not just talking about it.
- You're excited to travel ~25% of the time, working directly alongside customers.
Nice-to-Haves
- Salesforce platform experience or certifications (Administrator, Platform Developer I, Agentforce Specialist)
- Slack Certified Developer or experience deploying enterprise-grade Slack apps across multi-workspace (Enterprise Grid) environments
- Familiarity with agent frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex) and orchestration patterns
- Hands-on with cloud data platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery)
- Experience across specialist AI delivery areas: data engineering, platform architecture, or headless deployments
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. The same goes for compensation, benefits, promotions, transfers, reduction in workforce, recall, training, and education.
In the United States, compensation offered will be determined by factors such as location, job level, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Certain roles may be eligible for incentive compensation, equity, and benefits. Salesforce offers a variety of benefits to help you live well including: time off programs, medical, dental, vision, mental health support, paid parental leave, life and disability insurance, 401(k), and an employee stock purchasing program. More details about company benefits can be found at the following link: https://www.salesforcebenefits.com.
At Salesforce, we believe in equitable compensation practices that reflect the dynamic nature of labor markets across various regions.
The typical base salary range for this position is $148,500 - $260,100 annually. In select cities within the San Francisco and New York City metropolitan area, the base salary range for this role is $178,900 - $285,800 annually.
The range represents base salary only, and does not include company bonus, incentive for sales roles, equity or benefits, as applicable.
Prep for this interview
5 questions likely to come up at Salesforce, each matched to a line in this posting.
- 1Integrations and APIs
They wrote: “Design secure authentication and authorization mechanisms using OAuth, SSO, enterprise identity providers, and API gateways.”
How would you set up single sign-on for a large customer?
How to answer
Why they ask: SSO (SAML or OAuth/OIDC) is a common first task in enterprise deals and a common source of delays.
- Confirm their identity provider (Okta, Entra ID, Google) and protocol
- Exchange metadata and test in a staging tenant first
- Map user groups to roles in your product
- Plan for user removal: what happens when someone leaves the company
Tip: Mention the people involved, and the protocol second. The customer's identity team usually controls the timeline.
- 2LLMs, RAG and agents
They wrote: “Design agent intelligence: prompts, reasoning, tool calls, and integration with customer systems, leveraging our Agentic AI platform and current LLM techniques.”
A customer wants a chatbot over their internal documents. How do you build it?
How to answer
Why they ask: RAG is the most common first project. They want the whole path, from messy files to answers people trust.
- Collect and clean the documents; handle permissions per user
- Split them into chunks, embed, and store with source links
- Retrieve, then answer with citations; say “I don't know” when retrieval is weak
- Build a test set of real questions with expected answers before launch
Tip: Spend more time on the data and on testing than on the model.
- 3Coding
They wrote: “You're fluent in at least one of Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, or Apex — and willing to add to that list as the work demands.”
Here's a CSV export from a customer. Write a script that cleans it and loads it into our API.
How to answer
Why they ask: Very close to real FDE work. They watch how you handle bad rows and failures.
- Read with a proper CSV parser; check the header first
- Validate each row and collect errors, not crash on the first one
- Send in batches with retries and a clear report at the end
- Write one or two quick tests for the parsing
Tip: Talk through edge cases out loud: encodings, missing fields, duplicates, rate limits.
- 4Data and SQL
They wrote: “Build and integrate data pipelines on Salesforce Data 360, Snowflake, Databricks, and customer data platforms. Model the data, ship the pipeline, validate the output”
How would you design a daily pipeline that feeds customer data into our product?
How to answer
Why they ask: Tests basic data engineering: scheduling, failures, re-runs and monitoring.
- Extract with timestamps or change tracking, not full dumps, when possible
- Transform in steps you can re-run without creating duplicates
- Validate row counts and key fields before loading
- Alert a person on failure, with enough detail to fix it
Tip: Make re-running safe (same input, same result) and say how you'd know it failed.
- 5Travel
They wrote: “You're excited to travel ~25% of the time, working directly alongside customers.”
How do you handle being on the road with customers for weeks at a time?
How to answer
Why they ask: Many FDE roles involve regular travel. They check you know what you're signing up for.
- Your past travel or on-site experience
- How you stay productive away from the team
- What travel level works for you, said plainly
Tip: Be honest about what works for you. A mismatch here hurts both sides later.
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