Head of Data Platform & AI-Driven Analytics

James from Montana; New York, Northern (NY, KY); Hybrid; USD 218,000 - 365,000; Full time

Job summary

Salesforce is seeking a Senior Director of Data Engineering to lead a ~40-person team responsible for the full data stack, from ingestion to AI-facing data services. You will partner with Data Science & Analytics to drive a bold vision for agentic analytics and AI-powered development.

The role requires 10+ years in data engineering with leadership experience, building scalable data platforms, and a track record with AI/ML workloads and LLMs.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in data engineering, data platform, or infrastructure engineering roles, including 5+ years in engineering leadership at the Director level or above
• Proven track record building and scaling data platforms (ingestion pipelines, warehousing, semantic/metrics layers) at consumer or enterprise SaaS scale
• Experience leading through organizational change — team consolidations, re-orgs, or multi-team integrations
• Demonstrated success partnering with Data Science / Analytics leadership as a peer stakeholder
• Strong track record of hiring, developing, and retaining engineering managers and senior ICs
• Excellent cross-functional communication skills, with experience presenting technical vision and strategy to executive stakeholders
• A related technical degree required
• Experience building data platforms that serve AI/ML workloads
• Hands-on understanding of how LLMs and AI agents consume data — including semantic layers, embeddings, vector search, tool-use patterns (MCP, function calling)
• Experience with agentic systems, AI-assisted analytics, or building developer tools powered by AI
• Track record shipping data-as-a-product — APIs, SDKs, or self-serve platforms where internal or external developers are the primary consumers
• Experience operating a "pod" or embedded working model that pairs engineering with data science/analytics
• Familiarity with modern data stack components: warehouse infrastructure, streaming ingestion, semantic/metrics layers
• Experience running experimentation platforms and A/B testing infrastructure at scale

Responsibilities

• Architect data layers for AI agents to query, reason over, and act on Slack's data autonomously
• Transform the semantic layer with a machine-readable, governed metric definitions and lineage
• Build real-time data products enabling sub-second decision-making and low-latency retrieval
• Ship agentic analytics tooling for self-serve analytics and proactive insights
• Establish AI-native observability and cost attribution for data infrastructure
• Drive the Data MCP strategy to expose Slack's data to AI agents as a premier dataset

Skills

Data leadership

Data platforms

Ingestion pipelines

Data warehousing

Semantic layer

AI/ML workloads

LLMs integration

MCP patterns

Cross-functional comms

Education

Technical degree

Job description

Salesforce is seeking a Senior Director of Data Engineering to lead a ~40-person team responsible for the full data stack, from ingestion to AI-facing data services. You will partner with Data Science & Analytics to drive a bold vision for agentic analytics and AI-powered development.

The role requires 10+ years in data engineering with leadership experience, building scalable data platforms, and a track record with AI/ML workloads and LLMs.