VP - Database Engineering

Salesforce•Seattle, WA

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 world of work as we know it is changing and we're 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. Ready to level-up your career at the company leading workforce transformation in the agentic era? You’re in the right place! Agentforce is the future of AI, and you are the future of Salesforce. Salesforce Database Engineering builds and operates the cloud-native database platform that supports all core Salesforce traffic, forming the foundation of customer trust, availability, and scale across the Salesforce ecosystem. As Vice President of Salesforce Database Engineering, you will lead the organization responsible for evolving this mission-critical database platform as Salesforce expands across public cloud providers through HyperForce. You will define the long-term vision and drive execution for a globally distributed, multi-tenant database system that powers Salesforce applications for tens of millions of users worldwide. You will have the unique opportunity to work at the forefront of AI, cloud computing and infrastructure and contribute to enabling a full suite of Salesforce applications. This role requires a seasoned engineering leader with deep expertise in distributed systems and database technologies, proven experience operating large-scale cloud services, and the ability to build and lead geographically distributed engineering organizations. You will work closely with Public Cloud, HyperForce, Product Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, and Infrastructure leaders to ensure Salesforce’s database layer remains highly reliable, performant, secure, and cost-efficient as the platform evolves.

Requirements

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent experience.
20+ years of overall engineering experience, with 10+ years leading large, multi-level engineering organizations.
Deep expertise in distributed systems, databases, or large-scale storage platforms.
Proven experience owning and operating cloud-based, mission-critical services at B2C scale.
Strong background in service ownership, operational excellence, and 24×7 production systems.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to engage both executives and deeply technical audiences.

Nice To Haves

Experience building or operating cloud-native, multi-tenant database platforms.
Working knowledge of public cloud technologies (GCP, AWS, Azure) and large enterprise cloud migrations.
Experience partnering with public cloud platform teams and enabling large-scale platform transitions.
Strong grounding in data structures, algorithms, and object-oriented programming.
Agile mindset with experience operating in Scrum/Agile environments

Responsibilities

Strategy & Vision Define and own the long-term technical and organizational vision for Salesforce’s cloud-native database platform.
Partner with Public Cloud and HyperForce leadership to enable Salesforce’s unified platform and applications across public clouds, including GCP.
Set the roadmap for scalability, performance, durability, availability, and cost efficiency to support Salesforce’s current and future workloads.
Engineering & Architecture Leadership Lead the design, development, and evolution of a globally distributed, multi-tenant database system supporting all core Salesforce traffic.
Drive architectural decisions across storage, replication, consistency models, failover, disaster recovery, and data durability.
Collaborate closely with architects and product owners to build best-in-class database services and systems at scale.
Ensure strong engineering fundamentals, including modular design, correct abstractions, automated testing, and continuous integration.
Operational Excellence Own SLAs for availability, latency, and durability of Salesforce’s database infrastructure.
Lead database-related incident management for Sev-0 and Sev-1 events, including prevention, response, and post-incident learning.
Champion automation, observability, and operational rigor to safely operate services at extreme scale.
Execution & Delivery Drive execution by working across cross-functional teams spanning database engineering, public cloud infrastructure, HyperForce, SRE, and product engineering.
Balance long-term architectural investments with short-term delivery commitments.
Make critical technical and organizational decisions, innovating aggressively while managing operational risk.
People & Organizational Leadership Hire, build, and scale a world-class, geographically distributed engineering organization.
Mentor and grow senior engineers, architects, managers, and managers-of-managers.
Establish clear expectations for technical leadership, ownership, and accountability.
Foster an inclusive, high-performance culture with a strong emphasis on diversity and engineering excellence.
Cross-Functional & Executive Leadership Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to executive leadership and stakeholders.
Represent Salesforce Database Engineering in executive planning, architecture reviews, and strategic initiatives.
Encourage ideas, bring a strong point of view, and lead through influence as well as authority.

Benefits

Salesforce offers a variety of benefits to help you live well including: time off programs, medical, dental, vision, mental health support, paid parental leave, life and disability insurance, 401(k), and an employee stock purchasing program.
More details about company benefits can be found at the following link: https://www.salesforcebenefits.com.

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