Description
About Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Join Salesforce Commerce Cloud, the platform powering transactions for thousands of the world's leading brands. As the essential system of engagement for global retailers, Commerce Cloud is constantly evolving to deliver the next generation of intelligent shopping experiences. This strategic role is chartered to ensure we lead the market in innovation, defining the future of commerce by building and validating concepts before they become mainstream.
Role Description
We are seeking a visionary and highly-technical Innovation Architect to join the Commerce Cloud team. This strategic role is defined by its mission to ensure Salesforce is at the absolute forefront of market and technological innovation in the commerce space. You will act as the internal "futurist" and hands-on technical evangelist, continuously scanning the competitive landscape, identifying emerging technologies, and rapidly building compelling proof-of-concept (POC) demonstrations that define the next generation of our platform.
Your success will be measured by your ability to anticipate and demonstrate the innovations that will excite our customers and partners, ensuring we are the leaders, not the followers.
Your Impact
Define the Innovation Pipeline: Proactively research and analyze emerging technologies, market trends, competitive product releases, and community discussions to identify high-leverage innovation areas for Commerce Cloud.
Art-of-the-Possible Prototypes: Architect, develop, and present rapidly prototyped, high-fidelity technical demos that illustrate novel product capabilities and prove the technical feasibility of future-state ideas. These prototypes will be used to secure executive investment and influence the product strategy.
Competitive and Technical Intelligence: Establish a continuous process for competitive analysis, providing regular, concise technical reports to senior leadership and product teams detailing where competitors are investing and suggesting preemptive counter-strategies.
Technology Scouting and Advocacy: Evaluate and champion the adoption of new, bleeding-edge technologies, frameworks, and tools (especially around Generative AI, real-time data processing, and headless architecture) that could dramatically accelerate our development or unlock new product categories.
Cross-Functional Leadership: Partner closely with Product Management, Core Engineering Leadership, and Architecture teams to translate visionary concepts into concrete, actionable technical roadmaps and product themes for the Business Unit.
Mentorship and Standards: Act as a technical authority, mentoring senior engineers and guiding decision-making on emerging architectural patterns, distributed systems design, and best practices for delivering cutting-edge, scalable features.
Required Skills & Experience
10+ years of experience in a highly technical role (e.g., Principal Engineer, Technical Architect) with a proven track record of directly influencing product direction through research and hands-on demonstration.
Demonstrated ability to identify and successfully advocate for new technology investment that resulted in market-leading product features.
Expert-level Full Stack development and architecture experience with proficiency in multiple modern programming languages (e.g., Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, React, Go) and extensive hands-on experience designing and building scalable, distributed systems.
Deep and current knowledge of key industry trends in AI/ML, Real-time Data Streaming, Microservices, and Cloud Native Architectures.
Exceptional communication and technical storytelling skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical visions to both executive and engineering audiences through compelling demos and presentations.
Highly self-directed, entrepreneurial, and comfortable working in an ambiguous, future-focused environment with limited initial definition.
Direct experience with the Salesforce platform ecosystem, including Commerce Cloud, Data Cloud, and Agentforce.
Preferred Skills
Experience in the competitive landscape of commerce platforms, customer data platforms (CDP), or enterprise AI software.
Familiarity with Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) and the deployment of predictive or generative AI features into customer-facing environments.
Prior experience acting as a Technical Evangelist or presenting complex technical concepts at major industry conferences.
For roles in San Francisco and Los Angeles: 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.