Forward Deployed Engineer - Salesforce

NTT DATA Services•Chicago, IL

28d•Onsite

About The Position

Agents are becoming the users of enterprise software. Salesforce is responding by moving its value beneath the screen: capabilities any agent can invoke, business logic packaged as Skills, trusted context in Data 360, orchestration across vendors in Agent Fabric, and a choice of models from Salesforce's own CRM reasoning model to the frontier labs. Most enterprises can see the shift. Very few have someone who can explain where AI is going, decide what it means for their business and their Salesforce estate, and then make it work in production. That is this role. This is not a typical FDE role; most Forward Deployed Engineers embed one product in one company. Ours is a strategic seat in a global Salesforce practice. You will work across industries and our most strategic clients, not inside a single deployment. You will shape the question with client executives before anyone designs a solution. You will lead the conversation about where models, agents and Salesforce are heading, not only what ships this quarter. What you learn in the field becomes how the whole practice sells and delivers.

Requirements

Real AI depth. Frontier models such as Claude, GPT and Gemini, and open-weight models such as Llama, Nemotron and Mistral: their trade-offs in capability, cost, privacy, sovereignty and hosting, and when each belongs in an enterprise.
Command of agentic design patterns. Tool use, planning, multi-agent orchestration, retrieval and grounding, memory, evaluation, guardrails and human oversight, and where each fails in production.
A point of view on where AI is going. And how it reshapes Salesforce: headless capabilities, Skills, trusted context, agent identity and authority, and pricing that moves from seats to actions.
Deep Salesforce expertise. Real depth in at least one of Agentforce, Data 360 or MuleSoft, fluency across the rest, and the enterprise breadth to connect Salesforce to SAP, ServiceNow and the data estate.
Production scar tissue. Enterprise AI or platform programs you took live, and honest stories about what broke and how you fixed it.
A double register. Credible with a CIO at nine and with their most skeptical architect at ten, able to disagree with either without losing the room.
A public voice. You write and speak, and you enjoy it. You use AI tools every day; you do not need to be a production software engineer.

Nice To Haves

A Salesforce CTA or principal architect who has taken Agentforce or large platform programs live, and follows the AI frontier closely.
A Forward Deployed Engineer or senior solution engineer at Salesforce, an AI lab or a major ISV, ready for a wider canvas.
A field CTO or principal at a systems integrator or AI-native consultancy who has put enterprise AI into production.
An enterprise AI leader who has run agentic programs inside a large organization and now wants to shape many.

Responsibilities

Be the AI voice in the room. Brief client executives on where frontier and open-weight models, agents and Salesforce are heading, and what it means for their business and roadmap.
Shape our most strategic pursuits. Frame the problem, challenge whether an agent is the right answer, set the architecture, and pressure-test scope and estimate.
Choose the right intelligence for each step. Decide where a frontier model, an open-weight model, a CRM reasoning model, deterministic logic or a person belongs, and what each costs.
Make it real, fast. Prototype with AI-assisted tools and our engineers so clients see a working agent, not a promise.
Lead delivery while the risk is highest. Set direction with the architects, unblock the hardest problems, and lead escalations across Salesforce, MuleSoft, Data 360, models and enterprise systems, alongside Salesforce's own engineering teams.
Hand off, then move on. Once the solution is proven in production, transition ownership to our delivery and managed-service teams and take on the next frontier problem.
Lead our thought leadership. Publish, speak, and turn field patterns into the reference architectures and approaches the whole practice uses.