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 and a builder mindset non-negotiable.

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.
• Implement agent communication protocols, including Model Context Protocol (MCP) and agent-to-agent communication.
• Apply secure authentication and authorization (OAuth, SAML) and event-driven, message-queue patterns to build resilient workflows.
• Troubleshoot ingestion failures, mapping defects, schema drift, identity anomalies, query behavior, activation latency, API errors and permissions issues.
• Document trade-offs, recommend implementations, pair with customer teams, review code and package reusable metadata, scripts, tests and runbooks.
• Surface reproducible platform gaps and edge cases to Product and Support.

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 MDM platform.
• Experience building retrieval systems for AI applications (vector databases, search indexes, embedding pipelines, knowledge bases).
• Experience delivering in deadline-driven environments alongside customers, partners or professional services teams.

Required skills

• Proficiency in SQL and fluency in Apex, Java, Python or JavaScript/TypeScript.
• Data modeling, APIs, integration patterns, batch and streaming processing, and the differences between copied, federated and Zero Copy data access.
• Secure service-to-service integration (OAuth, SAML) and emerging agent protocols such as MCP.
• Relevant Salesforce certifications in Agentforce, Data 360 and the Salesforce Platform.