VP, Software Engineering

Salesforce•San Francisco, CA

1d•$257,500 - $496,400•Remote

About The Position

Salesforce is seeking a strategic, influential, and deeply experienced software engineering executive to lead our cross-platform functions of Delivery & Excellence. This role is designed for a senior technology leader who thrives at the intersection of engineering rigor, operational excellence, and cross-functional alignment across a large-scale, cloud-based enterprise SaaS platform. The Vice President of Engineering Delivery & Excellence will own the practices, standards, and organizational capabilities that elevate Platform engineering’s quality, reliability, productivity, performance, cost efficiency, and security posture. Platform engineering owns the shared foundation across Salesforce applications, and customers expect industry-leading “SaaS-ilities” that power their business-critical applications. This is not a traditional product engineering leadership role. Instead, this leader will oversee the engineering-wide “ilities”— Performance, Quality, Availability, Productivity, Cost to Serve, Security, and Accessibility—and ensure each becomes a durable, enforced, measurable discipline across all Platform Engineering teams. Fundamentally understanding, advocating, and applying effective and appropriate use of AI and agents to improving all these disciplines is fundamental to this charter and mission. In some domains you will directly lead an operating organization with deep technical ownership. In others, you will oversee smaller dedicated teams responsible for governance, consulting, tooling, and oversight. Across all areas, you will align and sometimes drive the frameworks, processes, and technical direction required to ensure every product team across Platform Engineering meets the highest operational and engineering excellence bar. You will be a partner to fellow executives of Product Development engineering reporting to the EVP and the broader engineering operations org. In addition, you will serve as a key member of the platform engineering leadership team and a representative of these critical engineering functions to the broader company. This role is for a change agent—an executive who can set vision, influence product and engineering peers, operationalize excellence at scale, and deliver measurable outcomes.

Requirements

15+ years of engineering leadership experience, including executive-level leadership of cross-functional engineering teams.
Extensive experience running or influencing shared engineering services, operational excellence functions, performance/reliability engineering, or similar cross-platform disciplines.
A proven ability to elevate engineering standards and operational maturity across large, distributed, multi-team organizations.
A deep understanding of enterprise SaaS “ilities,” including: Performance engineering and optimization, Quality engineering and automation, Availability, SLO/SLI frameworks, incident management, DR, Cloud cost optimization and financial governance, Security engineering, app security lifecycle, and compliance, Accessibility standards and implementation practices.
Demonstrated success driving accountability without direct control, influencing senior engineering leaders through clarity, relationships, data, and strategic alignment.
Excellent executive communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex engineering concepts to C-suite leaders, non-technical stakeholders, and engineering teams alike.
Experience implementing frameworks such as: DevOps / DevEx, SRE and reliability engineering, Secure SDLC / threat modeling, Quality engineering at scale, Performance engineering maturity models.
A bias for action, grounded judgment, and a focus on measurable outcomes.
A passion for building engineering systems that are stable, fast, cost-efficient, secure, and inclusive.

Responsibilities

Own and Drive Engineering Excellence Across the Platform: Establish the strategy, principles, and operating mechanisms for engineering quality, performance, reliability, availability, security, accessibility, and overall delivery excellence. Ensure these areas are not treated as reactive functions, but as foundational engineering disciplines embraced by every team across the Platform organization. Provide frameworks, standards, and tooling for these functions, but allow individual organizations within Platform to tailor them to their specific needs and stages. Lead some of these domains for the entire Salesforce Engineering organization, not just Platform.
Lead Multiple Functional Domains: Responsible for performance, optimization tooling, systemic improvements, and incident prevention. Oversee smaller domain teams for Quality (Q3), Availability, Security, Accessibility, and Cost to Serve: each responsible for governance, expertise, tooling strategy, consulting, and cross-team enablement.
Partner Cross-Functionally to Drive Adoption and Accountability: Work across Platform leadership: engineering management, principal architects, shared services teams, and product leadership to define standards and ensure consistent, high-quality execution across all products. Collaborate with cloud-level COOs and EngOps to align Platform’s technical health metrics with broader organizational operating rhythm. Drive technical change and clarity on how to improve key metrics. Work with leadership groups outside Platform: Office of Accessibility, Globalization team, Product Security, etc. Influence, align, and enforce engineering-wide norms while building trust and collaboration with peer organizations that report to the EVP of Platform Engineering.
Establish World-Class Delivery Practices: Define the system of delivery: how engineering plans, builds, tests, ships, monitors, and continuously improves. Partner with the broader Salesforce Developer Experience engineering teams and drive the technical evolution needed to support Platform’s CI/CD and test automation, and build and test environment requirements. Introduce clear quality gates, reliability KPIs,and engineering scorecards to create transparency and accountability across all teams. Have a constant and consistent focus on ensuring our developer’s productivity, via process, tools, and techniques. Modernize the software development lifecycle with the transformative and emerging AI tools and best practices.
Uplevel Operational Maturity: Ensure the platform meets enterprise-grade requirements for uptime, latency, security resilience, global scale, and end-to-end quality. Partner with SRE, Architecture, Product, and Security to prevent incidents before they occur and to reduce the cost and frequency of operational friction. Own and lead the Platform Operational Review monthly meeting, where all aspects of engineering operational excellence will be reviewed across the org.
Represent Engineering Excellence to the Company: Serve as the executive advocate for engineering quality, performance, security posture, accessibility commitments, and operational readiness across the company. Communicate priorities, tradeoffs, and status to executive leadership, business partners, and customer-facing teams.
Engage With and Be the Voice of Customers: Meet with customers proactively and reactively to understand issues regarding quality, availability, and scalability to influence product and engineering roadmap decisions. Communicate these learnings to the product and engineering org to drive prioritization.
Build a High-Impact, High-Trust Organization: Recruit, develop, and retain deeply skilled technical leaders across your domains. Instill a culture of rigor, metrics, accountability, and continuous improvement. Lead with empathy, clarity, and a passion for helping engineering teams do the best work of their careers.
Initial Areas / Initiatives to Potentially Lead: These are major areas of cross-platform scope requiring dedicated executive ownership: Performance Engineering Transformation: Building the performance org, developing platform-wide performance standards, and driving systemic improvements across dozens of services and development groups. Quality and Test Modernization (Q3): Uplifting test strategy, tooling, automation coverage, quality engineering best practices, and standards for release readiness. Availability & Reliability Operating Model: Defining availability SLAs, error budget policy, incident prevention frameworks, and reliability processes used across Platform Engineering. Cost to Serve Reduction: Partnering with infrastructure, cloud operations, and product teams to reduce operational costs, optimize architecture, and drive resource efficiency. Security Readiness & Compliance: Governance across authentication/authorization patterns, secure development life cycle, vulnerability remediation expectations, and cross-product security posture. Accessibility Engineering Standards: Ensuring all products align with accessibility requirements and enabling product engineering teams with guidance and tooling. Developer Productivity: Ensure best in class developer productivity across Platform, via developing and understanding productivity metrics, key tooling and process gaps or issues in the engineering SDLC, and owning the rollout (and sometimes creation) of new productivity enhancements. Smart and effective use of AI is fundamental and implicit to this charter. Each area above could require owning and delivering common tooling, frameworks, and evaluation methodologies to successfully scale out across the organization.