Principal Architect, Platform Identity

Salesforce•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

Salesforce is the #1 AI CRM, where humans with agents drive customer success together. Here, ambition meets action, tech meets trust, and innovation isn’t a buzzword — it’s a way of life. The company is looking for Trailblazers who are passionate about bettering business and the world through AI, driving innovation, and keeping Salesforce's core values at the heart of it all. This role is for a distinguished Principal Architect to serve as the definitive technical authority for the Salesforce Identity Platform. This is a high-gravity leadership role for an architect who excels at the intersection of global trust systems and immediate operational delivery. You will be the primary engine of identity integrity, ensuring that contemporary authentication and authorization designs are hardened, near-term releases are seamless, and the multi-year roadmap for Agentic Identity is an operational reality. You will traverse the strategic and the tactical, harmonizing Identity efforts across the enterprise and establishing unified, elegant architectural patterns that secure billions of global transactions.

Requirements

A track record of delivering massive, sophisticated Identity and Security projects at global scale.
Expert-level mastery of the modern identity stack, including deep-tier Authentication and Authorization patterns.
The ability to pivot seamlessly, resolving a critical mTLS handshake detail and drafting a multi-year strategic evolution for Agentic Identity.
A natural ability to spot misalignment across technical domains and the professional "gravity" to pull organizations together toward a unified Identity standard.

Responsibilities

Translate sophisticated trust requirements into elegant, production-ready architectures.
Author the definitive technical frameworks for modern authentication flows, granular authorization, and secure session management for accelerated delivery cycles.
Serve as the final arbiter for high-stakes Identity initiatives.
Lead the implementation of modern industry standards while pioneering the frameworks for Agentic Identity, ensuring that autonomous agents can authenticate and operate with the same level of trust and security as human users.
Lead the technical oversight of the platform’s most sensitive pathways, including Key Management, mTLS, and Token Exchange services.
Ensure every implementation is hardened for high-concurrency demands and maintains the highest standards of security integrity through rigorous design governance.
Navigate the balance between immediate feature delivery and long-term platform health.
Provide high-context, rapid decision-making on complex Customer Identity & Access Management challenges while ensuring the foundational trust architecture remains pristine.
Act as the primary technical bridge between senior leadership and cross-functional engineering domains.
Ensure that identity lifecycles across diverse products (e.g., Core, Slack, Tableau, Agentforce) are cohesive, frictionless, and interoperable.
Navigate complex organizational landscapes to align stakeholders on a singular Identity vision—balancing the need for developer agility with the uncompromising requirements of enterprise-grade security.
Partner with senior leadership to replace ad-hoc integration models with repeatable, standardized Identity-as-a-Service patterns.
Establish the frameworks that allow disparate clouds to inherit core security and identity controls autonomously.
Work closely with stakeholders to refine nebulous requirements into achievable technical milestones, ensuring every identity feature is sustainable and aligned with global engineering capacity.
Lead Long-Range Planning (LRP) initiatives and author the "North Star" papers that define the evolution of Zero-Trust, Verifiable Credentials, and Agentic Identity frameworks.
Influence the trajectory of global identity standards and specifications, ensuring tactical decisions made today align with the future of the global identity landscape.
Establish and enforce architectural principles across the Identity domain, evaluating emerging designs to ensure a consistent security posture and user experience across all Salesforce clouds.
Proactively evaluate emerging shifts—such as decentralized identity or AI-driven fraud detection—to determine their impact on the Salesforce ecosystem.
Serve as a force multiplier for the organization by providing high-impact coaching to senior architects, raising the collective bar for Identity engineering across Salesforce.
Act as a champion for the adoption of evolving AI-augmented coding tools.
Lead the effort to integrate these technologies into our engineering culture, demonstrating how AI can enhance architectural consistency and accelerate the delivery of secure, high-quality identity services.