Engineer, Software

JOB DESCRIPTION
Principal Software Engineer / Lead - Salesforce
Bill Rate: ***/hr
Location: Onsite 4 days a week
1. Position Snapshot
Job Title
Principal Software Engineer/Lead - Salesforce
Department / Team
Digital
Reports To
Sr. Manager - Architecture & Application Development
Career Track
Blend of Individual Contributor & Lead - highest IC level below Distinguished Engineer; peer-level to [Sr. Manager / Manager]
Direct Reports
20 engineering team members
Scope of Influence
3-5 Salesforce delivery teams / ~20 engineers that includes admins, DevOps engineers and functional analysts across Sales, Service, and Experience Cloud.
Location
Windsor, CT - Hybrid (5 days onsite per week)
Employment Type
Contract-to-Hire
Experience Required
12+ years total; [6+ / 8+] years Salesforce platform
2. Role Summary
WM SBS is seeking a Principal Software Engineer / Lead - Salesforce to serve as the highest level of technical authority for our enterprise Salesforce ecosystem. You will define platform architecture, establish engineering and governance standards, lead modernization, and ensure our Salesforce solutions remain scalable, secure, and maintainable as the business grows.
This role pairs deep Salesforce platform expertise with genuine software engineering fundamentals. Salesforce at enterprise scale is an integration, data, and governance problem as much as a development one - you will be expected to reason about org strategy, sharing and data architecture, governor limits, and system boundaries, not only about Apex and Flow. You will remain hands-on while influencing technology strategies across multiple teams and partnering closely with Architecture, Product, Security, and Data.
3. Expectations from the Position
3.1 Level Expectations
• Scope: Technical authority for the Salesforce platform across all supported business domains - not a single cloud, project, or delivery team.
• mbiguity: Operates on undefined or contested problems: org consolidation, build-vs-buy-vs-configure, declarative-versus-programmatic boundaries, and competing business demands on a shared platform.
• utonomy: Sets platform direction with minimal oversight; accountable for platform outcomes, not task completion.
• Hands-on balance: Approximately [50-60%] architecture, governance, design review, and mentorship; [40-50%] hands-on - complex Apex and LWC, integration design, prototypes, reference implementations, and production troubleshooting.
• Decision rights: Owns Salesforce architecture standards, the declarative-versus-code decision framework, and release governance; co-owns enterprise integration standards with [Enterprise Architecture].
• Boundary with the admin/declarative team: Define explicitly - who owns configuration change control, who approves Flows entering production, and how the CoE operating model works. This is the most common friction point in mature Salesforce orgs.]
3.2 Performance Milestones
Timeframe
Expected Outcomes
First 30 Days
Build relationships across Salesforce engineering, admin, product, security, and integration teams. Develop a working assessment of org architecture, data model, integration surface, and release process. Deliver an initial observations summary.
First 90 Days
Publish an org health and architectural risk assessment covering technical debt, governor limit exposure, sharing and data volume risk, and security posture. Establish an architecture review cadence and a documented decision framework.
First 6 Months
Own a socialized 12-18-month platform roadmap. Deliver measurable improvement in release quality and deployment cadence. Establish standards adopted across delivery teams and a functioning governance forum.
First 12 Months
Demonstrate delivery of a major modernization or transformation milestone. Evidence of reduced technical debt and improved platform reliability. Recognized as trusted technical advisor by senior business and technology leadership.
3.3 How Performance Will Be Measured
• Release quality and cadence: deployment frequency, failed-deployment rate*** change failure rate*** and rollback incidence.
• Platform reliability: Sev-1/Sev-2 incident volume and recurrence; governor limit and API limit breach frequency.
• Technical debt reduction: retirement of legacy automation, unmanaged customization, and unused metadata; measurable reduction in org complexity.
• Security and compliance posture: open critical/high findings, Health Check score trend, remediation cycle time, audit findings closed.
• Seasonal release readiness: regression coverage and time to certify each Salesforce release with zero business disruption.
• Cost efficiency: license utilization, API and storage consumption, and total platform cost against user and transaction growth.
• Talent impact: senior engineers and architects mentored, quality of design reviews, reusable frameworks and documentation produced.
4. Roles & Responsibilities
4.1 Technical Leadership
• Serve as the principal technical authority for the Salesforce platform.
• Define and govern Salesforce architecture standards, engineering practices, and development frameworks.
• Lead architectural reviews and technical decision-making across Salesforce initiatives.
• Establish platform roadmaps aligned with business and technology objectives.
• Provide technical leadership for large-scale transformational programs and platform enhancements.
• Mentor senior engineers, technical leads, solution architects, and senior administrators.
• Document and defend significant decisions through Architecture Decision Records and design documentation.
4.2 Salesforce Architecture & Solution Design
• Design scalable, secure, and maintainable solutions across the Salesforce ecosystem.
• Establish enterprise architecture patterns for Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Experience Cloud, and custom platform solutions.
• Lead data modeling, security architecture, sharing and visibility strategy, and platform governance.
• Own org strategy - single-org versus multi-org, environment topology, and metadata ownership boundaries.
• Define the decision framework for declarative versus programmatic solutions and enforce it consistently across teams.
• rchitect for scale within platform constraints - governor limits, large data volumes, ownership and lookup skew, and query performance.
• Define integration architectures between Salesforce and enterprise applications.
• Evaluate new Salesforce capabilities and determine adoption strategies, including build-versus-configure-versus-buy assessments for AppExchange solutions.
4.3 Platform Engineering & Development
• Lead development using Apex, Lightning Web Components, Flows, Platform Events, and platform services.
• Drive reusable framework development, shared component libraries, and engineering standardization.
• Ensure adherence to secure development and code quality standards, including meaningful test assertions rather than coverage compliance alone.
• Guide engineering teams through complex technical challenges and production escalations.
• Promote scalable development practices, bulkification discipline, and performance optimization.
• Establish standards for the maintenance and retirement of legacy Visualforce, Aura, and deprecated automation frameworks.
4.4 Enterprise Integration
• Design and govern integration solutions using APIs, event-driven architectures, middleware platforms, and messaging technologies.
• Define enterprise integration patterns, API strategy, and canonical data contracts.
• Ensure reliable and secure data exchange between Salesforce and enterprise systems, including [policy administration, claims, billing, data warehouse, and identity platforms].
• Design for API limit management, error handling, idempotency, replay, and reconciliation across integration boundaries.
• Collaborate with enterprise architects to align platform integrations with broader technology strategy.
4.5 Data Architecture & Governance
• Own the Salesforce data model, master data alignment, and system-of-record definitions with enterprise Data Management.
• Define data quality, retention, archival, and large volume strategies.
• Govern data migration and consolidation programs, including cutover and reconciliation approach.
• [Evaluate and guide Salesforce Data Cloud adoption and its relationship to the enterprise data platform, if applicable.]
4.6 Platform Modernization & Innovation
• Lead platform modernization initiatives and technical debt reduction programs.
• Drive migration of retired automation frameworks (Workflow Rules, Process Builder) to Flow, and Aura components to Lightning Web Components.
• Drive adoption of modern Salesforce capabilities and development frameworks.
• Evaluate emerging capabilities - including Einstein, Agentforce, Data Cloud, automation, and advanced analytics - and define adoption, guardrail, and evaluation strategy.
• Establish standards for responsible use of AI-assisted development tooling, including review, security, and intellectual property considerations.
• Recommend architectural improvements that enhance business agility and platform scalability.
4.7 DevOps & Operational Excellence
• Establish Salesforce DevOps standards, branching strategy, and deployment practices.
• Drive CI/CD automation, automated regression testing, and release management improvements.
• Promote source-driven development, sandbox and environment strategy, and test data management.
• Own seasonal release readiness - assessing the three annual Salesforce releases for impact, coordinating regression testing, and managing critical update remediation.
• Improve platform observability, reliability, and operational supportability, including event monitoring and proactive limit alerting.
• Partner with Security and Infrastructure teams to ensure compliance and governance requirements are met.
4.8 Security, Risk & Compliance
• Own the Salesforce security architecture - profiles and permission sets, sharing model, field-level security, and least-privilege access design.
• Ensure solutions satisfy applicable regulatory and audit obligations.
• Partner with Information Security on encryption strategy, event monitoring, access certification, and third-party/AppExchange package risk review.
• Contribute to business continuity planning, including backup, recovery, and data restoration strategy - recognizing that native platform recovery capabilities are limited.
4.9 Vendor, Licensing & Cost Management
• Provide technical input into Salesforce license planning, entitlement optimization, and contract renewal cycles.
• Govern AppExchange and third-party package evaluation, security review, and lifecycle management.
• Manage the technical relationship with Salesforce account, architect, and support teams, and with systems integration partners.
• Provide technical oversight of partner and offshore delivery quality against defined standards.
4.10 Cross-Functional Collaboration
• Partner with Product Owners, business stakeholders, enterprise architects, and engineering leaders.
• Translate business objectives into scalable technical solutions, and technical trade-offs into business terms.
• Influence platform investment decisions and technology strategy.
• Communicate complex technical concepts to technical and business audiences, up to and including executive leadership.
5. Technical Expertise
Category
Technologies & Capabilities
Salesforce Platform (Core)
Platform architecture; Apex (bulkification, asynchronous patterns, governor limits); Lightning Web Components; Flow and declarative automation; Platform Events; Salesforce APIs (REST, SOAP, Bulk, Streaming, Composite); security and sharing model; data modeling and governance; Visualforce and Aura (legacy maintenance)
Salesforce Clouds (Core)
Sales Cloud; Service Cloud; Experience Cloud. Preferred: Financial Services Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Data Cloud, Agentforce/Einstein
Integration (Core)
REST and SOAP APIs; event-driven architecture and Change Data Capture; MuleSoft or comparable middleware/ESB; messaging platforms (Kafka, JMS, Azure Service Bus); API management and gateway patterns; authentication (OAuth 2.0, JWT, SAML, mutual TLS); error handling, retry, and reconciliation design
DevOps & Engineering (Core)
Salesforce DX and source-driven development; Git branching and release strategy; CI/CD pipelines; deployment tooling (Gearset, Copado, Flosum, or equivalent); automated and regression testing; static code analysis (PMD, Salesforce Code Analyzer); sandbox, environment, and test data strategy
Architecture (Core)
Enterprise, integration, security, and data architecture; solution design; distributed systems fundamentals; scalability design within platform constraints; large data volume patterns
Supporting / Contextual
Salesforce Shield (encryption, event monitoring); backup and recovery tooling; CRM Analytics; identity and SSO architecture; general-purpose programming outside Apex (e.g., JavaScript, Java, .NET); cloud platform fundamentals (AWS/Azure); [insurance core system integration - Guidewire, Duck Creek, or equivalent]
6. Required Qualifications
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field - or equivalent practical experience.
• 15+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• 12+ years of Salesforce platform development and architecture experience - see note below.
• Deep expertise across Salesforce platform capabilities and architecture, including the security and sharing model.
• Demonstrated experience designing enterprise-scale Salesforce solutions in production.
• Strong understanding of software architecture, distributed systems, and integration patterns.
• Hands-on experience designing and governing integrations between Salesforce and enterprise systems.
• Proven ability to lead technical initiatives across multiple teams without direct authority.
• Experience establishing engineering standards, governance practices, and architecture review processes.
• Strong stakeholder management and written and verbal communication skills.
7. Preferred Qualifications
• Experience within insurance, financial services, healthcare, or another regulated industry.
• Experience leading enterprise-scale CRM transformation programs end-to-end.
• Experience with platform engineering, developer enablement, and Center of Excellence operating models.
• Experience with AI capabilities in the Salesforce ecosystem - Einstein, Agentforce, or Data Cloud.
• Experience with large-scale data migration, org consolidation, or merger integration programs.
• Familiarity with cloud-native architecture patterns and integration with non-Salesforce platforms.
• Experience managing Salesforce license optimization and vendor relationships.
• Contributions to the Salesforce community - Trailblazer Community leadership, user groups, Dreamforce or conference speaking, or open-source contribution.
7.1 Preferred Certifications
• Salesforce Certified Technical Architect (CTA).
• Salesforce Certified Application Architect.
• Salesforce Certified System Architect.
• Salesforce Certified Platform Developer II.
• Salesforce Certified Integration Architect or Data Architect.
8. Leadership Traits & Behavioral Competencies
8.1 Core Leadership Expectations
• Define the long-term Salesforce technology strategy.
• Influence architecture and engineering decisions across multiple business domains.
• Establish platform governance and engineering standards that teams adopt willingly.
• Drive platform scalability, security, and maintainability.
• Mentor technical talent across the Salesforce engineering and administration organization.
• Balance business delivery needs with long-term platform sustainability.
• Lead through technical expertise, architectural vision, and hands-on engagement.
8.2 Behavioral Traits
Trait
What It Looks Like in This Role
Influence Without Authority
Builds consensus across teams that do not report to them; wins adoption of standards through credibility rather than mandate.
Governance Without Bureaucracy
Establishes controls that raise quality without becoming a delivery bottleneck; knows when to say yes quickly.
Platform Stewardship
Protects the long-term health of a shared platform against short-term customization pressure from individual business units.
Pragmatic Judgment
Chooses configuration, code, or purchase on merit; resists both over-customization and reflexive declarative-only positions.
Business Fluency
Frames platform decisions in terms of cost, risk, revenue, and time-to-market; understands the commercial context of the CRM estate.
Communication Range
Adjusts depth and language effectively from administrator to executive; writes clearly and persuasively.
Mentorship & Multiplication
Measures success by the capability of others; grows architects rather than accumulating decisions.
Ownership & Accountability
Takes responsibility for platform outcomes including failures; leads blameless postmortems and drives corrective action.
Intellectual Humility
Invites challenge, updates positions on evidence, and disagrees constructively across business and IT boundaries.
Continuous Learning
Keeps pace with three annual platform releases and a fast-moving ecosystem; shares knowledge systematically.