VP, Engineering - Platform (Foundational Data Services)

Summary:

Salesforce is undergoing a massive transformation driven by the convergence of AI, our data lake, and unprecedented transactional scale. As the VP of Engineering for Foundational Platform Data Services, you will be a visionary leader at the forefront of transforming and expanding Salesforce's trusted, scalable, and intelligent platform in support of this transformation.

This strategic role is crucial to managing how data is shared, moved, and acted upon in real-time, with robust access control and governance across all APIs, data, and workflows in the entire Salesforce ecosystem, and key to the convergence of AI, Data Cloud, and unprecedented transactional scale.

You will lead three critical domains: Access Control, our Eventing Platform, and Virtual Data. These domains provide essential capabilities that enable a deeply unified and trusted platform experience, positioning us as the go-to partner for CIOs and CDOs. This pivotal position is indispensable to the success of top-company initiatives like Agentforce and Data Cloud, and plays a key part in harmonizing our products and technology stack, both homegrown and acquired.

Your responsibilities will include solving planet-scale challenges, re-architecting legacy systems for the Hyperforce era, and building the trusted data fabric that will power the next generation of intelligent, agent-first enterprise software. Your work will also be central to delivering a complete customer view and personalized engagement, all powered by our integrated data and AI capabilities.

A key part of this role is upholding our commitment to trust by ensuring robust access control and governance across all APIs, data, and workflows. You will empower efficient, high-performing teams to do their best work by staying true to our values of trust, inclusivity, and innovation, embracing product-led growth principles for customer success.

Responsibilities:

• Attract, hire, motivate, grow, and retain a world-class team of talented engineers
• Create an environment that encourages psychological safety, innovation, and risk-taking
• Promote a culture of collaboration and teamwork across organizational boundaries
• Create a clear and compelling vision for the team that inspires and enables us to build better products and identify future opportunities
• Support our customers, both external and internal, and ensure our products perform and scale well
• Build a broad base of support among key decision makers and influencers
• Assess strategic business needs; define, prioritize, drive initiatives, and allocate team resources appropriately
• Provide accurate scoping, clear strategies, and milestones for projects
• Communicate status & risks, and offer mitigation strategies to ensure on-time delivery of all committed projects to cross-functional teams
• Oversee project planning, staffing, and budgeting

Minimum Requirements:

• Exceptional ability to collaborate and influence across a large, complex organization, partnering effectively with numerous product and engineering stakeholders to deliver on company-wide strategic initiatives.
• 12-15 years leading large, globally distributed engineering organizations responsible for mission-critical, high-scale platform services.
• 4+ years leading teams in fast growing, evolving environments
• 4+ years in senior management (managed managers)
• 4+ years in an Agile/Scrum environment
• 3+ years working in an enterprise software company
• Outstanding attention to detail and communication skills
• The ability to make timely decisions, balancing analysis with decisiveness
• The ability to inspire and influence others, remove obstacles, and resolve conflicts effectively
• BS in Computer Science or equivalent work experience

Preferred Requirements:

• Deep technical expertise in distributed systems, asynchronous messaging platforms (e.g., Kafka), database architecture (relational, NoSQL, data lakes), and data virtualization/federation frameworks
• Strong background in building and operating secure, multi-tenant systems, with deep knowledge of complex access control models like Role-Based (RBAC) and Attribute-Based (ABAC) Access Control.
• Proven track record of driving large-scale architectural transformations, such as migrating monolithic services to a near-core or microservices architecture and navigating the complexities of public cloud infrastructure like AWS.
• Demonstrated ability to manage services with extreme scale and availability requirements, including handling billions of daily transactions and navigating high-pressure customer escalations and incidents.