Forward Deployed Engineer - Salesforce

NTT DATA Services • Chicago, IL

19d

About The Position

This is a senior, client-facing role in NTT DATA’s global Salesforce practice, working across industries and strategic clients rather than embedding on a single deployment. The Forward Deployed Engineer helps client executives understand developments in AI, models, agents, and Salesforce, determine their implications for the business and Salesforce estate, and bring strategic AI solutions into production. The role shapes pursuits early, establishes technical direction, prototypes solutions, leads through high-risk delivery and escalations, and transitions proven solutions to delivery and managed-service teams. Field learnings also inform the practice’s sales and delivery approaches, reference architectures, and thought leadership. The role involves regular travel to client sites and is based in a major U.S. city.

Requirements

• Demonstrated expertise with frontier models such as Claude, GPT, and Gemini, and open-weight models such as Llama, Nemotron, and Mistral, including trade-offs in capability, cost, privacy, sovereignty, and hosting.
• Command of agentic design patterns, including tool use, planning, multi-agent orchestration, retrieval and grounding, memory, evaluation, guardrails, and human oversight, with understanding of production failure modes.
• A point of view on the direction of AI and its implications for Salesforce, including headless capabilities, Skills, trusted context, agent identity and authority, and pricing models based on actions rather than seats.
• Deep expertise in at least one of Agentforce, Data 360, or MuleSoft; fluency across the others; and enterprise breadth connecting Salesforce to systems such as SAP and ServiceNow and to the data estate.
• Experience taking enterprise AI or platform programs into production, with the ability to discuss what failed and how it was fixed.
• Ability to communicate credibly with both CIOs and skeptical architects and to disagree without losing their confidence.
• Writes and speaks publicly and enjoys doing so; uses AI tools every day.
• Does not need to be a production software engineer.

Responsibilities

• Brief client executives on developments in frontier and open-weight models, agents, and Salesforce, and their implications for the business and roadmap.
• Shape strategic pursuits by framing problems, assessing whether agents are appropriate, setting architecture, and pressure-testing scope and estimates.
• Select the appropriate mix of frontier models, open-weight models, CRM reasoning models, deterministic logic, and human involvement, considering cost.
• Prototype solutions using AI-assisted tools in collaboration with engineers so clients can evaluate working agents.
• Set technical direction with architects, unblock difficult problems, and lead escalations across Salesforce, MuleSoft, Data 360, models, and enterprise systems alongside Salesforce engineering teams.
• Transition proven production solutions to delivery and managed-service teams, then take on new frontier problems.
• Publish and speak about AI and Salesforce, and turn field patterns into reference architectures and approaches used across the practice.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed