Director- Software Engineering- Performance Engineering

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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.

Director, Software Engineering - Sales Cloud

Tech Stack: (Java, Oracle, AWS, Big Data Pipelines)

R&D Cloud: Sales Cloud

About the Position:

Salesforce’s Sales Cloud team is seeking a seasoned Software Engineering Leader to drive performance and scalability for the Agentforce AI future. This leader will be pivotal in ensuring the performance and scalability of the entire Sales Cloud portfolio. They will focus on embedding performance and innovation into every product from its inception, championing best practices for developing highly performant, scalable, and innovative applications. A key aspect of their work is building and using AI-driven tools and frameworks to automate software testing, analysis, and optimization during the software development lifecycle. This is crucial for Sales Cloud to handle the exponential growth in transaction and data volumes. The ideal candidate possesses a strong understanding of scaling cloud-based enterprise software, managing distributed teams, and effectively supporting team members. They will have a proven track record of building teams at scale, deep expertise in SaaS enterprise platforms, a focus on key performance metrics, and the ability to execute effectively amidst competing priorities, demonstrating servant leadership. A critical focus of this role is spearheading our big data scaling initiatives, which involve scaling data engineering pipelines to support billions of transactions per day and collaborating closely with Sales Cloud enterprise customers to address their unique scaling requirements.

About you: 

Are you a passionate and hands-on technical leader with a proven track record in building systems technologies for large-scale data? Do you thrive in an environment where you can lead engineering teams and deliver innovative products that perform at scale? If so, you may be the ideal candidate. We are seeking a highly motivated individual passionate about solving complex challenges with creative solutions and enjoys mentoring and supporting others. As a leader, manager, and engineer, you will play a pivotal role in driving our team's success and shaping the future of our products.

Your Team:

Sales Cloud Performance Engineering team is dedicated to delivering a fast and scalable Sales Cloud experience for our customers. From the get go, you will lead a team responsible for the performance and scale of Sales Cloud applications, including Agentforce AI experiences, and the overall customer experience.

What you’ll be doing:

You’ll lead the mission to make applications faster and more scalable to support the ever-growing needs of our enterprise customers. The team empowers product teams to develop features with performance and scalability in mind. You will also be responsible for developing AI-powered tools and automation to optimize the performance and scalability of Sales Cloud products. Our customers rely on us to provide insights for their business-critical workflows, making Sales Cloud's responsiveness, speed, and scalability essential for customer adoption and success.

What you’ll achieve

• Support leadership vision and values, and inspire the team to do their best to achieve the goals.

• Manage deliverables, objectives, priorities, trade-offs, risks, and team performance. 

• Delegate effectively, providing context and resources and letting creativity flourish. You know when to stay out of the way, and when to intervene in the best interest of your team and the company.

• Provide technical leadership and career development to the team. Invest in continuous employee development of a highly technical team by mentoring and coaching engineers and technical leads in the team.

• Drive innovation and technical excellence, managing complex technical projects. 

• Communicate status, risks, and mitigation strategies to ensure on-time delivery of high-performance solutions. 

• Partner with product engineering teams to build scalable systems. 

• Attract, hire, and develop top talent. 

• Identify opportunities and improve the processes and culture of the engineering organization.

Responsibilities:

• Lead a team of talented engineers who like to ship performant code and tackle hard engineering problems to meet the scale for our largest customers.
• Establish the necessary processes to achieve optimal product performance
• Manage complex technical projects and provide roadmap planning.
• Drive improvements to enhance our infrastructure's enterprise readiness
• Coach, mentor, and provide constructive feedback to direct reports.
• Grow the team and align project assignments with career development goals and company vision
• Serve as the scrum master and build efficient and healthy teams
• Collaborate with Product Management, Operations and other stakeholders to develop a vision and roadmap for the team
• Foster a collaborative, cross-team environment with other Salesforce Industries engineering managers, promoting autonomy, inclusivity, innovation, learning, respect, and transparency, while maintaining high delivery standards.
• Cultivate a team culture of ownership, empowerment, and innovation
• Hire, develop, and grow the talent in the team
• Drive scalable and extensible architecture and good product development practices
• Work closely with Support and key customers on production issues
• Ensure Customer escalations are handled with priority and stays Green
• Demonstrate problem solving and technical innovation through hands-on involvement.

Requirements:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 15+ years in a software engineering leadership position, managing engineering teams.
• Experience in the software industry, including time as an individual contributor, with at least 5+ years of experience in optimizing large scale systems and big data pipelines.
• 8+ years of engineering experience coding in at least one programming language (e.g., Java, C/C++), and experience learning new development languages. 

• Extensive experience with performance and scalability, metrics, and tooling. 

• Experience with AWS, Kafka, Storm, ElasticSearch, Cassandra, NoSQL, Postgres/MySQL, Redis, Big Data, Data Lakes, and Kubernetes. 

• Knowledge of LLM, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), and AI applications is a plus. 

• Experience with big data and pipeline processing at scale. 

• Experience with IAAS scale (AWS, GCP, Azure), with familiarity in multi-tenant architecture. 

• Experience partnering with product engineering teams to build scalable systems. 

• Evaluate business goals from a capacity, reliability, performance and scale perspective, translating these into requirements and influence product roadmaps.

• Experience in recruiting and managing engineering teams focused on performance and scale. 

• Excellent communication and presentation skills for both technical and non-technical audiences. 

• Strong understanding of product design principles, especially for data-intensive applications. 

• Ability to adapt to and manage multiple competing priorities in a fast-paced environment. 

• Technical expertise in data modeling, distributed systems technologies, and cloud deployment (provisioning, multi-tenancy, frameworks, and tools for system monitoring and logging). 

• Experience with Agile software development methodologies and short release cycles.

About Salesforce:

Salesforce is the world’s leading customer relationship management technology, helping you build and improve your customer relationships. In 1999 we pioneered cloud-based CRM, and today we’re helping organizations of all sizes re-imagine their business for the world of AI. How? With Agentforce, providing trusted, autonomous AI agents that take action for your employees and customers. With unified data from all your systems, so every employee has a 360-degree view of every customer. And with #1 CRM apps for your sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT teams.

About the Position:

Salesforce’s Sales Cloud team is looking for a seasoned engineering leader to lead the Performance Engineering team into Agentforce AI future. The team champions and drives performance through all of the Sales Cloud portfolio of products. They focus on building performance and innovation into each product by getting involved early in scrum team’s work, drive all things performance and innovation, and evangelize best practices for developing highly performant, scalable, and innovative applications. They build AI tools and frameworks to automate testing of the software during development. This work is critical to ensure Sales Cloud can scale for the tremendous growth we have seen in our transaction and data volumes. Strong knowledge of how to approach scaling cloud based enterprise software as well as how to distribute people on work and support your team. A successful candidate is someone who has experience building performance teams at scale, has deep experience with SaaS enterprise platforms, knows the right metrics to measure success, demonstrates strong execution amidst competing priorities, and a respected servant leader. The current need is to spear-head our big data scale efforts, which involves scaling data engineering pipelines to billions of transactions per day and working with our Sales Cloud enterprise customers - to onboard them and work with them closely to meet their scale needs.

About you:

Are you a passionate and hands-on technical leader with a proven track record in building systems technologies for large-scale data? Do you thrive in an environment where you can lead engineering teams and deliver innovative products? If so, you may be the ideal candidate. We are seeking a highly motivated individual who is passionate about solving complex challenges with creative solutions and enjoys mentoring and supporting others. As a leader, manager, and engineer, you will play a pivotal role in driving our team's success and shaping the future of our products.

Your Team

Sales Cloud Performance Engineering team is responsible for making Sales Cloud delightfully fast and scalable for our customers. From the get go, the team you lead will own the performance and scale of the Sales Cloud applications including Agentforce Agents and the experience we provide to our customers. 

What you’ll be doing

You’ll help drive the team's charter to make applications faster and more scalable to support our ever growing needs of enterprise customers. The team is responsible for empowering product teams to build their features in a performance and scalable way. You will also be responsible to build out tooling and automation for measuring and optimizing performance and scalability of Sales Cloud products. Our customers rely on us to provide insights for their business critical workflows and so keeping Sales Cloud responsive, fast and scalable is critical to the adoption and success of our customers.

What you’ll achieve

• Support leadership vision and values and inspire the team to do their best to achieve the goals. 

• Manage deliverables, objectives, priorities, trade offs, risk and performance of the team. 

• Delegate effectively, providing context and resources and letting creativity flourish. You know when to stay out of the way, and when to intervene in the best interest of your team and the company. 

• Provide technical leadership and career development to the team. Invest in continuous employee development of a highly technical team by mentoring and coaching engineers and technical leads in the team.

• Drive innovation and technical excellence and manage complex technical projects. 

• Communicate status, risks, and offer mitigation strategies to ensure on-time delivery and highly performant solutions. 

• Partner with product engineering teams to build scalable systems

• Attract, hire and develop top talent.

• Participate in identifying opportunities and improving the processes and culture of the engineering organization in general

Responsibilities:

• Lead a team of talented engineers who like to ship performant code and tackle hard engineering problems to meet the scale for our largest customers.

• Establish the necessary processes to achieve the best possible performance in the product

• Manage complex technical projects and provide roadmap planning.

• Provide improvements that help our infrastructure to be enterprise-ready, leading projects ranging from seed plans to customer-focused enhancements

• Coach, mentor and provide real-time, meaningful, sensitive, and constructive feedback to direct reports

• Grow the team and align project assignments with career development goals and company vision

• Serve as the scrum master and build efficient and healthy teams

• Collaborate with Product Management, Operations and other stakeholders to develop a vision and roadmap for the team

• Drive cross team collaborative work environment with other Salesforce Industries engineering managers that fosters autonomy, inclusivity, innovation, learning, respect and transparency while holding a high bar for delivery

• Cultivate a team culture of ownership, empowerment, and innovation

• Hire, develop, and grow the talent in the team

• Drive scalable and extensible architecture and good product development practices

• Work closely with Support and key customers on production issues

• Ensure Customer escalations are handled with priority and stays Green

• Demonstrate problem solving and technical innovation through "rolling-up sleeves" and "getting hands dirty"

Requirements:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent experience

• 15+ years in a software engineering leadership position with experience in managing engineering team

• Experience in the software industry, including time as an individual contributor, with at least 5+ years of experience in optimizing large scale systems and big data pipelines. 

• 8+ years of engineering experience coding in at least one programming language, and experience learning new development languages (e.g., Java, C/C++, etc).

Experience with performance and scalability engineering, metrics and tooling, performance R&D

• Experience with AWS, Kafka, Storm, ElasticSearch, Cassandra, NoSQL. Postgres/MySQL, Redis, Big Data, Data Lakes, and Kubernetes

• Knowledge on LLM, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), AI applications is a plus   

• Experience with big data and pipeline processing at scale 

• Experience with IAAS scale (AWS, GCP, Azure). Major points for familiarity with multi-tenant architecture. 

• Experience partnering with product engineering teams to build scalable systems

• Evaluate business goals from a capacity, reliability, performance and scale perspective, translating these into requirements and influence product roadmaps.

• Experience in recruiting, managing engineering teams

• Excellent communication and presentation skills across technical and non-technical audiences

• Critical eye for product design, well-versed in good design principles especially around data applications

• Ability to adapt and handle multiple competing priorities in a fast-paced environment

• Technical expertise in data modeling, distributed systems technologies, and cloud deployment (provisioning, multi-tenancy, frameworks, and tools for system monitoring, logging).

• Experience with Agile software development methodologies and short release cycles

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