Principal AI & Salesforce Architect - Remote in US

NTT DATA Services•Remote, TX

1d•$128,858 - $238,625•Remote

About The Position

We are currently seeking a Principal AI & Salesforce Architect - Remote in US to join our team in Remote, Texas (US-TX), United States (US). This is a strategic, AI-forward role that stays with the client while uncertainty and risk are highest, remains through production, and hands ownership to the delivery team once the solution is proven and stable. This is a strategic seat in a global Salesforce practice, working across industries and our most strategic clients. You will shape the question with client executives before anyone designs a solution and lead the conversation about where models, agents and Salesforce are heading. You will prototype, debug, inspect code, understand failure modes and work directly with engineers to unblock the hardest problems. What you learn in the field becomes how the whole practice sells and delivers.

Requirements

10+ years delivering enterprise technology, platform or architecture programs, including substantial Salesforce experience and named deployments taken through production.
Demonstrated enterprise AI, agentic or complex Salesforce platform delivery, with direct involvement in architecture decisions, high-risk problem solving and production stabilization.
Evidence of operating at both executive and deep technical levels, leading through ambiguity and transitioning proven solutions to sustained delivery teams.
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, accuracy, cost, latency, privacy, sovereignty, hosting and failure behavior, 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 – including where each pattern fails in production.
A point of view on where AI is going. And how it reshapes Salesforce: headless capabilities, Skills, trusted context, Agent Fabric, agent identity and delegated authority, and pricing that moves from seats to actions.
Security for autonomous systems. Practical judgment in agent identity, delegated authority, least-privilege tool access, policy enforcement, human approval, auditability and revocation.
Deep Salesforce expertise. Strong command of Salesforce architecture, security model, limits and data modeling. 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, Databricks and the wider data and application estate through resilient API, event and batch patterns.
Hands-on technical fluency. Able to prototype, trace failures, inspect Apex, Lightning Web Components, Flow, APIs and integration code, read logs and work directly with engineers; you do not need to be a full-time production software engineer.
Production scar tissue. Named enterprise AI or platform programs you took live, with specific accounts of what broke, how you diagnosed it, the trade-offs you made and how stability was restored.
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 modern AI-assisted tools every day and turn field experience into reusable guidance.

Nice To Haves

Salesforce CTA, Application Architect, System Architect, Platform Developer, Agentforce, Data 360 or MuleSoft credentials are valued, but are not substitutes for production delivery and AI judgment.
Published articles, conference presentations, reference architectures or other visible thought leadership in enterprise AI, agents or Salesforce.

Responsibilities

Be the AI voice in the room. Brief client executives on where frontier and open-weight models, agents and Salesforce are heading, and translate that direction into business and technology roadmaps.
Shape our most strategic pursuits. Frame the problem, challenge whether an agent is the right answer, set the architecture and pressure-test scope, estimates, operating assumptions and risk.
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. Weigh accuracy, cost, latency, privacy, sovereignty, hosting, operability and failure modes – not novelty.
Design agentic systems. Architect orchestration, tool use, retrieval and grounding, memory, evaluation and guardrails across Agentforce, Data 360 and external model platforms, and define how agents are tested, monitored and improved once they are live.
Design trusted agent authority. Define agent identity, delegated authority, tool access, action boundaries, approval checkpoints, auditability and revocation so agents act with least privilege, mapped onto the Salesforce security model and the client’s enterprise identity.
Architect across the estate. Translate business, functional and non-functional requirements into Salesforce designs, data models and integration patterns spanning Agentforce, Data 360, MuleSoft, Databricks and the wider enterprise estate, protecting platform integrity and maintainability.
Make it real, fast. Prototype with AI-assisted tools and our engineers; inspect and debug code, traces and integrations as needed so clients see working behavior and failure modes early, not a promise.
Lead delivery while the risk is highest. Set direction with architects, unblock the hardest problems and lead escalations across Salesforce, MuleSoft, Data 360, models and enterprise systems, alongside delivery teams and Salesforce engineering.
Stay through production. Remain engaged through production validation and stabilization, using real operating behavior to test the architecture and help restore stability when the hardest issues surface.
Hand off, then move on. Once the solution is proven and stable, transition architecture decisions and the reasoning behind them, known risks, runbooks and ownership to the delivery or managed-service technical lead and take on the next frontier problem.
Lead our thought leadership. Publish, speak and turn field patterns into the reference architectures, decision frameworks and approaches the whole practice uses.
Raise the bar. Mentor architects and engineers on AI and agentic design so the practice’s depth grows with every engagement.