Engineer, Software

Principal Software Engineer / Lead — Salesforce

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

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.

Expectations from the Position

Level Expectations

• Scope: Technical authority for the Salesforce platform across all supported business domains — not a single cloud, project, or delivery team.

• Ambiguity: 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.

• Autonomy: 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.]

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.

How Performance Will Be Measured

• Release quality and cadence: deployment frequency, failed-deployment XXXX, change failure XXXX, 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.

Roles & Responsibilities

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.

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.

• Architect 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.

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.

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.

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.]

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.

DevOps & Operational Excellence