Level

Salesforce

Senior Director, Forward Deployed Engineering

Salesforce is hiring a Senior Director, Forward Deployed Engineering in San Francisco, United States. It pays $197k-$299k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Salesforce.

Level's read on this job

  • Level rates this forward deployed engineer role Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
  • Pay on this posting starts 8% higher than the typical forward deployed engineer posting on Level.
  • The posting mentions Model Context Protocol, RAG and AI agents among its tools and skills.
  • Level classes it as an executive role.
  • Salesforce has 1,500+ other open roles on Level.

AI in this role

Lead the Forward Deployed Engineering team specializing in Agentic AI solutions, multi-agent intelligence, and customer deployments.

model-context-protocol
ragai-agentsai-safetystrategic-leadershipmulti-agent-systemsai-orchestrationtechnical-leadership

To get the best candidate experience, please consider applying for a maximum of 3 roles within 12 months to ensure you are not duplicating efforts.

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.

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.

About the Role:

We are seeking a technically adept and innovative Agent Builder Leader to join our Forward Deployed Engineering Team. You will lead a high performing Agent Builder expert team to deliver Agentic solutions directly with customers. Your primary responsibility will be to provide strategic and technical leadership, fostering innovation and cultivate a culture focused on continuous improvement. As a key member of the Agentforce leadership team, you will define the standards, and operating model that allow Agentic AI capabilities, directly influencing the product roadmap for agentic adoption across our customer base.

Your Impact:

  • Strategic Leadership: Define the long-term strategy for Agentic AI deployments across industries.
  • Drive Multi-Agent Intelligence: Establish best practices and reference architectures for Model Context Protocol (MCP), inter-agent communication, and AI orchestration within multi-agent systems.
  • Own Agentic Development Life Cycle (ADLC): Standardize ADLC across all the engagements. Oversee project delivery and ensure the deployed agents meet customer needs while scaling robustly in enterprise production environments.
  • Internal and External Thought Leadership: Evangelize Salesforce’s agentic architecture vision internally and with strategic customers, industry partners, and ecosystem developers.
  • Operational Excellence: Build a high-performing team capable of delivering enterprise-ready, production-grade agentic systems.
  • Cross-functional Collaboration: Partner cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, and Sales leadership to shape the strategy and execution of Agentic AI solutions.
  • Governance and Security Stewardship: Oversee policies for data privacy, and compliance. Partner with internal security and legal teams to enforce responsible AI practices globally.

Required Qualifications:

  • 10+ years of experience in building and scaling enterprise-grade applications or enterprise AI systems, including 5+ years in leadership roles overseeing technical teams.
  • Exceptional communication and presentation skills, with proven ability to influence and engage executive stakeholders on complex technical roadmaps with both technical and non-technical teams.
  • Expertise in AI implementations, including RAG, vector databases, search indexes, and knowledge bases, specifically for grounding Agentforce solutions with enterprise data.
  • Expert-level knowledge of distributed systems, event-driven architecture, and asynchronous processing principles.
  • Current, comprehensive knowledge of the LLM landscape, including the specifications, capabilities, and ideal use cases for major foundational and frontier models relevant to enterprise AI deployment, along with the tooling ecosystem.
  • Deep understanding of how AI agents operate within enterprise ecosystems, including the principles of multi-agent orchestration, data-driven decisioning, and autonomous action design.
  • Ability to think strategically while remaining technically credible with Product, Engineering and Architecture teams.
  • Ability to travel 30% of the time, as needed to customer sites.

Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience architecting data or integration solutions using MuleSoft, or Einstein GenAI Agentforce or similar platform.
  • Industry thought leader in the convergence of AI, and enterprise integrations.
  • Prior experience leading multi-disciplinary teams in fast-scaling or global enterprise environments.
  • Track record of production-ready deployments in secure, regulated enterprise environments.

Unleash Your Potential

When you join Salesforce, you’ll be limitless in all areas of your life. Our benefits and resources support you to find balance and be your best, and our AI agents accelerate your impact so you can do your best. Together, we’ll bring the power of Agentforce to organizations of all sizes and deliver amazing experiences that customers love. Apply today to not only shape the future — but to redefine what’s possible — for yourself, for AI, and the world.

Accommodations

If you need a reasonable accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please submit a request via this Accommodations Request Form.

Please note that Salesforce uses artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help our recruiters assess and evaluate candidates’ resumes and qualifications throughout the recruiting process. Humans will always make any candidate selection and hiring decisions. Please see our Candidate Privacy Statement for more information about how we use your personal data and your rights, including with regard to use of AI tools and opt out options.

Posting Statement

Salesforce is an equal opportunity employer and maintains a policy of non-discrimination with all employees and applicants for employment. What does that mean exactly? It means that at Salesforce, we believe in equality for all. And we believe we can lead the path to equality in part by creating a workplace that’s inclusive, and free from discrimination. Know your rights: workplace discrimination is illegal. Any employee or potential employee will be assessed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications – without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression or identity, transgender status, age, disability, veteran or marital status, political viewpoint, or other classifications protected by law. This policy applies to current and prospective employees, no matter where they are in their Salesforce employment journey. It also applies to recruiting, hiring, job assignment, compensation, promotion, benefits, training, assessment of job performance, discipline, termination, and everything in between. Recruiting, hiring, and promotion decisions at Salesforce are fair and based on merit. The same goes for compensation, benefits, promotions, transfers, reduction in workforce, recall, training, and education.

In the United States, compensation offered will be determined by factors such as location, job level, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Certain roles may be eligible for incentive compensation, equity, and benefits. Salesforce offers a variety of benefits to help you live well including: time off programs, medical, dental, vision, mental health support, paid parental leave, life and disability insurance, 401(k), and an employee stock purchasing program. More details about company benefits can be found at the following link: https://www.salesforcebenefits.com.Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring, Salesforce will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

At Salesforce, we believe in equitable compensation practices that reflect the dynamic nature of labor markets across various regions. The typical base salary range for this position is $196,700 - $299,390 annually. In select cities within the San Francisco and New York City metropolitan area, the base salary range for this role is $216,370 - $329,210 annually. The range represents base salary only, and does not include company bonus, incentive for sales roles, equity or benefits, as applicable.

How we rate this

Senior Director, Forward Deployed Engineering at Salesforce rates 80 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

RAGAI agentsAI SafetyStrategic LeadershipMulti Agent SystemsAI OrchestrationTechnical LeadershipModel Context Protocol

Also common in forward deployed engineer jobs at this level

Pay

This job starts at
$197k
Typical forward deployed engineer job
$182k

This posting starts 8% above the typical forward deployed engineer job. See forward deployed engineer jobs

Questions you could be asked

  1. How would you design a retrieval step so the model answers from real data instead of guessing?
  2. How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
  3. How do you think about the risk of an AI system in this kind of role failing silently?
  4. Tell me about a project where strategic leadership was part of your work. What did you do?
  5. Tell me about a project where multi agent systems was part of your work. What did you do?

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: RAG, AI agents, AI Safety, Strategic Leadership, and Multi Agent Systems. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
  • Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
  • Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.

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