Director, Forward Deployed Engineering

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Job Category
Software Engineering

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.

The Product Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team is Salesforce's zero-to-one engine for new agentic product innovation. We embed directly with our most strategic customers to validate emerging AI capabilities, harden the platform under real-world conditions, and transform every field insight into repeatable patterns that shape the product roadmap.

We are looking for a Director, Forward Deployed Engineering to lead our Agentforce pillar under the Global Delivery organization.

This is a strategic leadership role operating at the intersection of field engineering, research, and product development. You will embed senior technical talent with strategic customers to incubate emerging products, validate pre-GA and early GA capabilities, and generate the product signal that drives roadmap priorities - ensuring what we learn in the field directly shapes what gets built next.

• Lead a High-Performing Team: Recruit, mentor, and develop a global team of Product FDEs, driving technical excellence and career growth at scale. Own organizational design, headcount planning, and capacity strategy to ensure the team is resourced to deliver impact across the field.
• Ensure Operational Excellence: Define and monitor key performance indicators - including field intelligence reports, technical gap analyses, product opportunity assessments, and internal AI adoption. Coach your team on improvement areas and effectively manage complex engagements.
• Diversity & Equality: You'll create a diverse, inclusive and psychologically safe environment for your team.

• Maintain Technical Authority: Serve as the executive-level technical authority for Agentforce. Stay current on platform capabilities and partner with Product & Engineering to ensure the FDE organization has deep expertise in existing and upcoming releases.
• Scale Frameworks & Assets: Champion the development of standardized engagement methodologies, technical playbooks, and reusable assets that can be scaled across the full FDE organization.
• Guide Complex Engagements: Lead your team in assessing R&D opportunities, defining research hypotheses, and identifying opportunities to create new product capabilities and accelerators that strengthen the global platform and apps. Engage directly on the highest-complexity technical challenges where executive presence and deep expertise are required.
• Influence Product: Act as the voice of the field with Product and Engineering. Translate patterns from customer deployments into actionable product feedback, shaping roadmap priorities and tooling investments that accelerate platform adoption at scale.

• Drive Success: Build and sustain executive-level relationships across a strategic customer portfolio. Ensure customers realize measurable business value from Agentforce deployments, driving adoption depth and long-term consumption growth.
• Manage Portfolio Performance: Operationally manage your portfolio, monitoring key metrics including migration timelines, technical debt reduction, and post-migration health scores to accelerate progress toward completion goals.
• Strategic Alignment: Partner closely with Product, Engineering, Customer Success, and Professional Services teams to ensure customers benefit from R&D engagement while capturing lessons learned and feeding insights back into the product.
• Thought Leadership: Maintain a sharp point of view on the competitive landscape - continuously identifying and validating Salesforce's key differentiators. Translate field intelligence into thought leadership, best practices, and enablement content.

• Proven Leadership: in enterprise software or SaaS environments, with a strong focus on Innovation and Enterprise Architecture in complex environments - including 5+ years in leading and scaling high-performing technical organizations.
• Salesforce Agentforce Expertise: Deep technical understanding of the Salesforce ecosystem, specifically AI / Agentforce architecture and how to optimize it for scale.
• AI Fluency: AI fluency across agent configuration, model security, AI governance, LLM integration & agent orchestration with metadata and API based extensibility for Agentforce.
• Modern Agentforce Architecture: Experience operationalizing agent lifecycle management, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) patterns, and trusted execution architectures for Agentforce.
• Technical Fluency: Working proficiency in one or more programming languages (Python, JavaScript, Apex, or Java); able to engage credibly with engineers and architects without relying on intermediaries.
• Strategic Problem-Solving: Proven ability to diagnose systemic failure patterns - whether product, configuration, or model performance - and translate ambiguous field signals into structured, actionable insights for Product & Engineering.
• Executive Communication: Exceptional written and verbal communication skills; able to distill complex technical findings into crisp narratives that resonate with C-suite customers and internal leadership without requiring follow-up.
• Operational Intelligence Mindset: Experience leveraging product telemetry, observability data, and field intelligence to identify platform patterns, surface product gaps, and inform R&D prioritization at an organizational level.
• High Agency & Organizational Agility: Track record of building and leading teams that thrive in ambiguous, high-stakes environments - instilling a culture of experimentation, fast iteration, and continuous learning across the organization.
• Willingness to Travel: Ability to travel 20-30% to customer sites and company engagements.

• Prior leadership experience in a forward deployed engineering, solutions engineering, or technical advisory organization - with direct accountability for field outcomes and customer technical success.
• Hands-on familiarity with Salesforce CRM, Agentforce platform, and Data 360; fluency with adjacent enterprise platforms a strong plus.
• Deep understanding of AI and machine learning concepts, understanding of the agent platform, how to configure and set up agents, hook them into existing flows, automation, API connection, etc.
• Proven ability to build thought leadership presence - through content, community engagement, or executive influence - that elevates both team credibility and platform adoption.