Lead / Principal Forward Deployed Engineer, Data 360

About the role

Salesforce is hiring Forward Deployed Engineers focused on Data 360, its real-time data engine that unifies data from any source. You will be a hands-on Technical Builder who configures, builds, tests and deploys Data 360 directly inside enterprise customer environments, turning approved solution designs into working implementations. The role is hands-on data and software engineering, with production implementation experience required.

Key responsibilities

• Configure and develop in customer sandboxes and production, following security, change-management and release controls.
• Build ingestion, harmonization and identity resolution pipelines, and materialize data views tuned for application, analytical and agentic workloads.
• Create test data and validate outcomes across happy paths, edge cases, access boundaries, hierarchies, failure conditions and large volumes.
• Design and maintain the AI data integration layer: RAG, vector databases, search indexes and knowledge bases that ground Agentforce solutions.
• Implement agent communication protocols, including Model Context Protocol (MCP) and agent-to-agent communication.
• Apply data governance principles to secure integration, transformation and governance of structured and unstructured data across Salesforce and external systems.
• Use message queues, event-driven architecture and distributed systems to build resilient workflows, with OAuth and SAML authentication and authorization.
• Troubleshoot ingestion failures, mapping defects, schema drift, identity anomalies, query behavior, activation latency, API errors and permissions issues.
• Document trade-offs, recommend implementations, and co-build with customer technical teams, partners and account teams, then hand off to production.
• Surface platform gaps and edge cases to Product and Support, and use AI tooling to speed up builds.

Required profile

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering or technical implementation, including a production data solution you can explain in detail.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.
• Hands-on experience implementing Salesforce Data 360 (Data Cloud) or a comparable enterprise data platform.
• Experience building data pipelines and integrations with platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift, Kafka, cloud object storage or an enterprise MDM platform.
• Proficiency in SQL and fluency in at least one implementation language (Apex, Java, Python or JavaScript/TypeScript).
• Experience building retrieval systems for AI applications (vector databases, search indexes, knowledge bases) and secure service-to-service integration (OAuth, SAML, event-driven architectures).