Description
About the Role
The Product Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team is Salesforce's zero-to-one engine for new agentic product innovation. We embed directly with our most strategic customers to validate emerging AI capabilities, harden the platform under real-world conditions, and transform every field insight into repeatable patterns that shape the product roadmap.
We are looking for a Senior Director, Forward Deployed Engineering to lead our Agentforce Supply Chain organization.
This is a senior technical leadership role at the intersection of AI, enterprise supply chain, and product development. You'll embed expert engineering talent with strategic customers to own and evolve the agentic workflow infrastructure powering Agentforce Supply Chain — purpose-built for complex, multi-party manufacturing environments. In doing so, you'll incubate emerging capabilities, validate pre-GA and early GA features, and generate the product signal that drives roadmap priorities — ensuring what we learn in the field directly shapes what gets built next.
Your Impact
Leadership & Team Management
Lead a High-Performing Team: Recruit, mentor, and develop a global team of Product FDEs, driving technical excellence and career growth at scale. Own organizational design, headcount planning, and capacity strategy to ensure the team is resourced to deliver impact across the field.
Ensure Operational Excellence: Define and monitor key performance indicators — including field intelligence reports, technical gap analyses, product opportunity assessments, and internal AI adoption. Coach your team on improvement areas and effectively manage complex engagements.
Diversity & Equality: You'll create a diverse, inclusive and psychologically safe environment for your team.
Technical Strategy & Execution
Maintain Technical Authority: Serve as the executive-level technical authority for Agentforce Supply Chain. Stay current on platform capabilities and partner with Product & Engineering to ensure the FDE organization has deep expertise in existing and upcoming releases.
Scale Frameworks & Assets: Champion the development of standardized engagement methodologies, technical playbooks, and reusable assets — including agents, automation scripts, and diagnostic frameworks — that can be scaled across the full FDE organization.
Guide Complex Engagements: Lead your team in assessing R&D opportunities, defining research hypotheses, and identifying opportunities to create new product capabilities and accelerators that strengthen the global platform and apps. Engage directly on the highest-complexity technical challenges where executive presence and deep expertise are required.
Influence Product: Act as the voice of the field with Product and Engineering. Translate patterns from customer deployments into actionable product feedback, shaping roadmap priorities and tooling investments that accelerate platform adoption at scale.
Customer & Business Impact
Drive Success: Build and sustain executive-level relationships across a strategic customer portfolio. Ensure customers realize measurable business value from Agentforce deployments, driving adoption depth and long-term consumption growth.
Manage Portfolio Performance: Operationally manage your portfolio, monitoring key metrics including migration timelines, technical debt reduction, and post-migration health scores to accelerate progress toward completion goals.
Strategic Alignment: Partner closely with Sales, Customer Success, Product, and Professional Services teams to ensure customers benefit from R&D engagement while capturing lessons learned and feeding insights back into the platform and apps.
Thought Leadership: Maintain a sharp point of view on the competitive landscape — continuously identifying and validating Salesforce's key differentiators. Translate field intelligence into thought leadership, best practices, and enablement content.
Required Qualifications
Proven Leadership: 5+ years in direct people management or indirect leadership roles, with a track record in talent management and technical team building.
Industry Expertise: Practical experience in Supply Chain Management (SCM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), or similar complex enterprise solutions.
AI/Agentic Platform Authority: Demonstrated track record deploying AI/LLM-based solutions at scale — including agentic frameworks, prompt engineering, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) — with the credibility to represent Salesforce's AI vision at the executive level with customers and partners.
Technical Fluency: Working proficiency in one or more programming languages (Python, JavaScript, Apex, or Java); able to engage credibly with engineers and architects without relying on intermediaries.
Strategic Problem-Solving: Proven ability to diagnose systemic failure patterns — whether product, configuration, or data — and translate ambiguous field signals into structured, actionable insights for Product & Engineering.
Executive Communication: Exceptional written and verbal communication skills; able to distill complex technical findings into crisp narratives that resonate with C-suite customers and internal leadership without requiring follow-up.
Operational Intelligence Mindset: Experience leveraging product telemetry, observability data, and field intelligence to identify platform patterns, surface product gaps, and inform R&D prioritization at an organizational level.
High Agency & Organizational Agility: Track record of building and leading teams that thrive in ambiguous, high-stakes environments — instilling a culture of experimentation, fast iteration, and continuous learning across the organization.
Willingness to Travel: Ability to travel 20–30% to customer sites and company engagements.
Preferred Qualifications
Prior leadership experience in a forward deployed engineering, solutions engineering, or technical advisory organization — with direct accountability for field outcomes and customer technical success.
Degree in Industrial Engineering, Supply Chain Management, Computer Science, or a related technical field (or equivalent relevant experience).
MBA or an advanced degree in Industrial Engineering, Supply Chain Management, or Operations Research.
Hands-on experience with supply chain workflow platforms (e.g., Regrello, Coupa, o9 Solutions, Blue Yonder, or similar).
Experience designing target operating models for global supply chains with complex multi-site, multi-party requirements.
Experience with Salesforce CRM, Supply Chain Management, or comparable enterprise systems.
Hands-on familiarity with Salesforce CRM, Agentforce platform, and Data 360; fluency with adjacent enterprise platforms a strong plus.
Proven ability to build thought leadership presence — through content, community engagement, or executive influence — that elevates both team credibility and platform adoption.
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.