Senior Director, Technology Program Management
Salesforce is hiring a Senior Director, Technology Program Management in San Francisco, United States. It pays $191k-$321k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Salesforce.
Level's read on this job
- Works on AI ●●●○ is how Level rates this role: the daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- Tools and skills the posting cites include Databricks, RAG and AI agents.
- Level classifies it as an executive role.
- Level lists 1,500+ other open roles at Salesforce.
AI in this role
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Job Category
Program & Project ManagementJob 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.
The Experience
We are seeking an exceptional Senior Director of Technology Program Management to serve as the execution backbone for the Chief Data Officer’s organization. This leader will own portfolio governance and execution across our most strategic Data/AI ML Platforms, Analytics, AI, Integration, Automation, Governance, and platform transformation initiatives. The role requires a rare combination of deep technical fluency, exceptional program rigor, executive presence, and the courage to drive accountability across organizational boundaries.
This is not a traditional PMO role. We are looking for a technology leader who can operate at executive altitude while going deep enough to understand architecture, data flows, technical dependencies, product constraints, operational readiness, and delivery risk. This person will create clarity where there is ambiguity, surface issues early, drive decisions, and ensure that commitments translate into measurable outcomes.
What You’ll Actually Be Doing
Portfolio Strategy & Governance
- Own the end-to-end portfolio operating model for the Chief Data & Intelligence Office, connecting strategy, investments, roadmaps, milestones, dependencies, capacity, risks, and measurable business outcomes.
- Establish a single, trusted view of portfolio health: what is on track, what is at risk, why it is at risk, who owns recovery, and what decisions or executive interventions are required.
- Drive annual and quarterly planning, prioritization, sequencing, resource trade-offs, portfolio reviews, and executive steering mechanisms across a highly interdependent technology landscape.
- Define portfolio health metrics and mechanisms that improve delivery predictability, decision velocity, dependency management, and value realization.
Technical Program Leadership
- Lead large-scale, technically complex Data & AI programs spanning modern data platforms, data engineering and ingestion, analytics, governance, master/reference data, integration and APIs, cloud infrastructure, AI/ML, generative AI, agents, and enterprise automation.
- Partner deeply with Product, Engineering, Architecture, Security, Operations, Governance, and business leaders to translate technical roadmaps into executable integrated plans.
- Understand and challenge architecture, sequencing, non-functional requirements, technical debt, security, reliability, scalability, data quality, and production-readiness assumptions; identify systemic risks before they become delivery failures.
- Manage critical cross-program and cross-platform dependencies, including dependencies across Data Solutions, other Digital Enterprise Technology pillars, Technology & Product, business teams, and strategic partners.
Execution Excellence & Accountability
- Create a culture where commitments mean something. Establish clear owners, dates, decision rights, exit criteria, and measurable outcomes—and hold yourself and others equally accountable.
- Surface risks and uncomfortable truths early. Constructively call out missed commitments, insufficient ownership, slow decisions, or execution gaps, and drive a credible recovery plan.
- Lead high-cadence operating reviews and technical deep dives that remove blockers, accelerate decisions, and keep business-critical milestones on track.
- Balance inclusion with accountability: invite diverse perspectives, build trust, and create psychological safety while maintaining a high bar for performance, transparency, and follow-through.
Cross-Organizational Leadership
- Influence without authority across senior leaders and globally distributed teams; resolve competing priorities and drive alignment when ownership spans multiple organizations.
- Serve as a trusted advisor to VP/SVP executives, translating complex technical and execution signals into concise insights, choices, risks, and recommendations.
- Reduce organizational friction by clarifying ownership, resolving dependency conflicts, and ensuring teams understand how their commitments affect the broader portfolio.
AI-First Leadership
- Be a visible role model for AI-first ways of working. Personally use AI and automation to improve planning, synthesis, dependency analysis, risk detection, executive reporting, decision support, and program operations.
- Bring practical fluency in generative AI, LLMs, agents, agentic workflows, RAG, embeddings/vector search, context engineering, tool orchestration, evaluation, observability, AI governance, and responsible AI.
- Challenge the TPM organization to automate coordination work, codify reusable AI skills and workflows, and demonstrate measurable gains in speed, quality, and capacity.
- Partner with technical teams to ensure AI programs are grounded in trusted data, governed context, secure access, measurable quality, and production-grade operational controls.
Team Leadership & Culture
- Build, mentor, and scale a high-performing portfolio and Technical Program Management organization; develop leaders who combine technical depth with disciplined execution.
- Set a high bar for program craftsmanship, executive communication, judgment, ownership, and continuous improvement.
- Create an inclusive, transparent culture where teams debate constructively, escalate responsibly, learn quickly, and remain relentlessly focused on outcomes.
You’re Our Person If…
- You bring 12–15+ years of experience in technical program management, engineering, product/platform delivery, or related technology leadership roles, including significant experience at enterprise scale.
- You have a proven track record leading portfolios of complex, multi-year Data, Analytics, Cloud, Platform, or AI programs with substantial technical and organizational interdependencies.
- You are technically credible with senior engineers and architects and can understand, question, and challenge complex system designs without needing to be the primary architect.
- You have strong knowledge of modern data architectures, distributed/cloud data platforms, software development lifecycles, APIs/integration, data governance, reliability, security, and AI/agent architectures.
- You demonstrate exceptional executive communication, structured problem solving, financial and capacity management, and the ability to turn ambiguity into clear decisions and executable plans.
- You are comfortable challenging senior stakeholders respectfully, holding peers and teams accountable, and making difficult calls when commitments or outcomes are at risk.
- You have experience building and developing high-performing TPM or portfolio teams and leading effectively in a global, matrixed organization.
- You are hands-on and credible with AI: you do not simply sponsor AI transformation—you use it, learn it, and model how it should change the way technology teams work.
- You have direct experience delivering enterprise-scale customer, master, reference, or operational data platforms; analytics/BI; data governance; integration platforms; or production AI/agent capabilities.
- You have experience with large SaaS environments such as Salesforce, cloud data platforms (Data 360/Snowflake/Databricks etc), data observability, metadata/semantic layers, and enterprise platform modernization.
- You hold a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical discipline; an advanced degree is a plus.
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.
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 $191,100 - $320,600 annually. In select cities within the San Francisco and New York City metropolitan area, the base salary range for this role is $228,600 - $348,600 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, Technology Program Management at Salesforce rates 70 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ 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
Questions you could be asked
- How would you design a retrieval step so the model answers from real data instead of guessing?
- How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
- How do you think about the risk of an AI system in this kind of role failing silently?
- What's a project where you used Databricks hands-on?
- Describe a typical day in a role like this one: which parts run through AI directly?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: RAG, AI agents, AI Safety, and Databricks. 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.
- Show where AI is part of your daily process, not a one-off project. This role expects it to be a running habit.
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