VP, Global Compensation

The opportunity:

AI is changing the content of work, the pace at which skills gain and lose value, and the standard for how People teams operate. Compensation has to keep up without losing clarity, fairness, or financial discipline. Salesforce is looking for a U.S.-based senior leader who can build that balance into the architecture, programs, and operating practices that support a global workforce.

The Vice President, Global Compensation will own Salesforce's worldwide broad-based compensation strategy, architecture, and governance, including U.S. delivery. This leader will connect business and talent strategy to global job architecture, salary structures, geographic pay, annual compensation programs, pay equity and transparency, analytics, and the global compensation workstream for acquisitions.

The role combines enterprise ownership of broad-based compensation with strong partnership across Executive & Equity Compensation, Global Benefits, Global Incentive Compensation, Finance, Legal, Tax, Payroll, Stock Administration, People Analytics, Talent, Employee Relations, and business leadership.

What you'll own

Set worldwide strategy and governance:

• Define the global compensation philosophy. Translate business strategy, workforce priorities, and talent-market realities into durable principles for how Salesforce pays across the United States and international markets.

• Build practical governance. Establish enterprise standards, decision rights, policy ownership, approval thresholds, and documented exception paths that preserve global coherence while allowing justified local variation.

• Shape enterprise and Board-level decisions. Prepare decision-quality analysis and materials for the C-suite, People leadership, and relevant governance bodies; present clear alternatives and explicit cost, talent, risk, and employee-impact tradeoffs while respecting formal approval authorities.

Architect jobs and pay globally:

• Own the global job architecture. Maintain job families, career streams, levels, profiles, and evaluation standards that support career clarity, workforce planning, organization design, and consistent pay decisions.

• Design scalable pay structures. Set salary ranges, market-positioning principles, geographic differentials, and refresh cadences for selected U.S. and international labor markets; use reputable surveys and Legal-approved market-data protocols.

• Respond to changing skill value. Identify critical-skill and labor-market signals, evaluate targeted premiums or differentiated approaches, and manage internal equity and compression implications.

Lead global compensation programs:

• Run the annual compensation agenda. Own worldwide design and governance of salary, merit, promotion, and broad-based bonus programs, including U.S. execution, budgets, systems requirements, calibration, controls, manager guidance, and employee communications.

• Manage total direct compensation coherently. Connect base pay and broad-based incentives with equity strategy through close partnership with Executive & Equity Compensation, Finance, Tax, Legal, and Stock Administration.

• Maintain the global policy suite. Govern pay decisions for hiring, promotions, transfers, off-cycle adjustments, geographic moves, and retention situations with clear principles and usable tools.

Advance pay equity and transparency:

• Build objective pay practices. Embed documented, job-related criteria into job evaluation, range design, offers, movement, and annual pay decisions.

• Lead global pay-equity analytics. Develop recurring analyses, remediation scenarios, and execution governance; support counsel-directed reviews and keep legal conclusions and privilege decisions with Legal.

• Operate across the U.S. regulatory mosaic. Own the range architecture, geographic-pay inputs, data, and operating controls that enable recruiting and People teams to meet evolving federal, state, and local pay-transparency and reporting requirements.

• Set the global transparency framework. Translate candidate, employee, and reporting requirements across jurisdictions into scalable processes, manager tools, and communications.

Turn data into enterprise decisions:

• Model the choices. Build multi-year forecasts and scenarios that show the cost, market, talent, equity, compression, currency, and implementation effects of major compensation decisions.

• Strengthen the data foundation. Set global standards for compensation data quality, definitions, access, controls, and lineage across planning, market pricing, reporting, and decision support.

• Measure what matters. Create a focused scorecard for program competitiveness, internal consistency, cycle accuracy and timeliness, budget performance, exception patterns, adoption, and operating efficiency.

Build the future of compensation:

• Translate changes in work into pay implications. Partner with Future of Work, Talent, Workforce Strategy, and People Analytics teams to understand how AI changes tasks, roles, skills, career paths, and talent scarcity.

• Run disciplined experiments. Test skills-based pay, targeted skill premiums, and new approaches to AI-affected roles through defined hypotheses, guardrails, success measures, and controlled pilots before scaling.

• Apply AI responsibly. Use governed AI, automation, and advanced analytics to improve market pricing, scenario modeling, cycle operations, anomaly detection, and advisory support. Validate data and model quality, document material assumptions, protect confidential data, monitor for discriminatory outcomes, and preserve accountable human judgment.

Lead compensation through acquisitions and change:

• Own the global compensation workstream for M&A. Lead diligence, job and employee mapping, acquired-company pay and incentive assessment, retention arrangements, harmonization options, and cost and risk modeling across jurisdictions.

• Create an executable integration path. Define decision points, transition principles, milestones, communications, and exception governance in partnership with Rewards, Finance, Legal, Tax, Payroll, Mobility, and Employee Relations.

Build the team and enterprise capability:

• Lead a high-performing global function. Build a diverse, succession-ready team of compensation partners with strong technical depth, business judgment, and regional credibility.

• Raise compensation capability. Equip People Partners, recruiters, managers, and leaders with clear guidance, decision tools, and training that improve the quality and consistency of pay decisions.

• Create trust through clarity. Explain complex choices in plain language, surface tradeoffs early, and maintain strong relationships across regions, functions, and levels.

What success looks like:

• Clear worldwide governance. Leaders understand global principles, decision rights, and exception paths, and material decisions are documented and repeatable.

• Coherent global architecture. Jobs, levels, and pay structures have defined coverage, ownership, and refresh cadences across selected labor markets.

• Reliable delivery. Annual compensation cycles are accurate, on time, within approved budgets, and supported by usable manager and employee communications.

• Publication-ready transparency. U.S. and international posting inputs, range practices, reporting data, and pay-equity operating routines are reliable, current, and supported by the appropriate Legal review.

• Better enterprise decisions. Executives and governance bodies use clear scenario analysis to make informed tradeoffs, and global acquisition compensation milestones move from diligence through integration.

• Measured modernization. Controlled technology and AI use cases reduce manual work or error, improve cycle time or insight quality, and maintain privacy, control, and human accountability.

• Stronger capability. The compensation team, People Partners, recruiters, and managers can apply the company's pay principles with greater consistency and confidence.

What you'll bring:

• Enterprise compensation leadership. 15+ years of progressive compensation or Total Rewards experience, including leadership of complex, multi-country programs and high-performing teams.

• Broad-based depth. Demonstrated expertise in compensation philosophy, job architecture, market pricing, salary structures, geographic pay, annual salary and incentive cycles, and program governance.

• Business and financial judgment. Ability to connect talent choices to business strategy and model cost, workforce, market, equity, compression, and implementation tradeoffs with Finance.

• Fairness and transparency. Experience building objective pay-setting frameworks, leading pay-equity analytics and remediation planning, and operationalizing pay-transparency requirements with Legal and People partners.

• Data and technology fluency. Strong command of compensation data, advanced analytics, scenario modeling, visualization, HR systems, and the controls required to produce reliable decision support.

• Responsible AI practice. Evidence of moving an AI or automation use case from experiment to controlled production with measurable improvement in accuracy, cycle time, controls, capacity, or user experience.

• Transformation experience. A record of modernizing compensation programs or operating models, leading through ambiguity, and delivering change that managers and employees can understand and use.

• M&A capability. Experience with compensation diligence, employee and role mapping, retention arrangements, harmonization, cost modeling, and integration governance.

• Executive influence. Credibility with C-suite leaders and senior People, Finance, Legal, and business stakeholders; able to turn technical detail into clear choices and recommendations.

• Cross-functional fluency. Working knowledge of executive and equity compensation, broad-based equity, sales incentives, benefits, mobility, tax, payroll, and accounting sufficient to lead across specialist boundaries.

• U.S. and global fluency. Experience operating in a changing U.S. federal, state, and local environment and across multiple international markets, with the judgment to engage counsel early.

• Public-company interface. Working fluency in executive and equity compensation governance, SEC disclosure context, and share-based-payment cost considerations; specialist filing, accounting, tax, and approval authority remains with the relevant functions.

• Education. Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience. An advanced degree or relevant professional certification is welcomed.

How you lead:

• Precise and practical. You turn ambiguity into clear principles, decision rights, and operating mechanisms.

• Curious without chasing novelty. You test promising ideas, define evidence up front, and scale only what works.

• Candid and low ego. You challenge constructively, explain tradeoffs plainly, and change course when the evidence changes.

• Human-centered and accountable. You understand that pay decisions affect trust and opportunity, and you pair innovation with disciplined judgment.

• Calm under pressure. You can lead high-stakes annual cycles, executive decisions, and transformation work without losing rigor or perspective.