Senior Director, Forward Deployed Engineering
Posted 10 days ago
The role in short
Lead a team of Agent Builders to deliver production-grade agentic AI solutions directly with customers, defining standards for multi-agent orchestration and the Agentic Development Life Cycle.
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.
About Salesforce:
We’re 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:
We are seeking a technically adept and innovative Agent Builder Leader to join our Forward Deployed Engineering Team. You will lead a high performing Agent Builder expert team to deliver Agentic solutions directly with customers. Your primary responsibility will be to provide strategic and technical leadership, fostering innovation and cultivate a culture focused on continuous improvement. As a key member of the Agentforce leadership team, you will define the standards, and operating model that allow Agentic AI capabilities, directly influencing the product roadmap for agentic adoption across our customer base.
Your Impact:
- Strategic Leadership: Define the long-term strategy for Agentic AI deployments across industries.
- Drive Multi-Agent Intelligence: Establish best practices and reference architectures for Model Context Protocol (MCP), inter-agent communication, and AI orchestration within multi-agent systems.
- Own Agentic Development Life Cycle (ADLC): Standardize ADLC across all the engagements. Oversee project delivery and ensure the deployed agents meet customer needs while scaling robustly in enterprise production environments.
- Internal and External Thought Leadership: Evangelize Salesforce’s agentic architecture vision internally and with strategic customers, industry partners, and ecosystem developers.
- Operational Excellence: Build a high-performing team capable of delivering enterprise-ready, production-grade agentic systems.
- Cross-functional Collaboration: Partner cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, and Sales leadership to shape the strategy and execution of Agentic AI solutions.
- Governance and Security Stewardship: Oversee policies for data privacy, and compliance. Partner with internal security and legal teams to enforce responsible AI practices globally.
Required Qualifications:
- 10+ years of experience in building and scaling enterprise-grade applications or enterprise AI systems, including 5+ years in leadership roles overseeing technical teams.
- Exceptional communication and presentation skills, with proven ability to influence and engage executive stakeholders on complex technical roadmaps with both technical and non-technical teams.
- Expertise in AI implementations, including RAG, vector databases, search indexes, and knowledge bases, specifically for grounding Agentforce solutions with enterprise data.
- Expert-level knowledge of distributed systems, event-driven architecture, and asynchronous processing principles.
- Current, comprehensive knowledge of the LLM landscape, including the specifications, capabilities, and ideal use cases for major foundational and frontier models relevant to enterprise AI deployment, along with the tooling ecosystem.
- Deep understanding of how AI agents operate within enterprise ecosystems, including the principles of multi-agent orchestration, data-driven decisioning, and autonomous action design.
- Ability to think strategically while remaining technically credible with Product, Engineering and Architecture teams.
- Ability to travel 30% of the time, as needed to customer sites.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience architecting data or integration solutions using MuleSoft, or Einstein GenAI Agentforce or similar platform.
- Industry thought leader in the convergence of AI, and enterprise integrations.
- Prior experience leading multi-disciplinary teams in fast-scaling or global enterprise environments.
- Track record of production-ready deployments in secure, regulated enterprise environments.
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.Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring, Salesforce will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.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 $196,700 - $299,390 annually
There is a different range applicable to specific work locations. In California and New York, and select cities in the metropolitan areas of Boston, Chicago, Seattle, and Washington DC, the base pay range for this role in those locations is $216,370 - $329,210 per year. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for the job location during the hiring process.
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.
- 1Cloud, deployment and security
They wrote: “Governance and Security Stewardship: Oversee policies for data privacy, and compliance. Partner with internal security and legal teams to enforce responsible AI practices globally.”
The customer's security team sends a 200-question review. How do you handle it?
How to answer
Why they ask: Security reviews often block deals. FDEs help get through them.
- Start from your company's standard answers (SOC 2 report, past reviews)
- Answer clearly; don't oversell
- Bring in your security team for anything you're unsure of
- Keep the new answers for the next customer
Tip: Reuse past answers, flag honest gaps, and offer a call for the hard questions.
- 2Travel
They wrote: “Ability to travel 30% of the time, as needed to customer sites.”
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.
- 3Discovery and scoping
They wrote: “Exceptional communication and presentation skills, with proven ability to influence and engage executive stakeholders on complex technical roadmaps with both technical and non-technical teams.”
How do you decide what to build first when a customer wants ten things?
How to answer
Why they ask: FDEs have limited weeks per customer. This tests judgment about value, effort and risk.
- Score each request by business value and by effort, with the customer in the room
- Pick one item that proves value fast and unblocks later work
- Write down what's out of scope so it doesn't creep back in
- Revisit the list after the first release, with real usage data
Tip: Show a simple way to rank the list and name what you'd leave out on purpose.
- 4Integrations and APIs
They wrote: “Experience architecting data or integration solutions using MuleSoft, or Einstein GenAI Agentforce or similar platform.”
Walk me through connecting our product to a customer's internal system that has no documentation.
How to answer
Why they ask: This happens weekly in the job. They want a calm, step-by-step method.
- Find who owns the system and get read access to a test environment
- Watch real traffic or logs to learn the data shapes
- Build a thin adapter with logging around every call
- Agree on how failures get reported, and who fixes what
Tip: Talk about finding the owner of the system first. The code is the easy part.
- 5LLMs, RAG and agents
They wrote: “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.”
When would you use an agent that takes actions, and how do you keep it safe?
How to answer
Why they ask: Agent work is growing fast in FDE postings. Senior candidates are expected to know where agents fail.
- Use agents for multi-step tasks with clear success checks; avoid them where one wrong action is costly
- Give the agent narrow tools and permissions, not broad access
- Require human approval for risky actions
- Log every step so the customer can audit it
Tip: Start from the cost of a wrong action. Limit what the agent can do, and log everything.
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