Senior Director, Data Engineering - Slack

Slack; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Salesforce is seeking a Senior Director of Data Platform to lead Slack's data foundation, guiding a ~40-person team from infrastructure to data products and AI-facing services. You will partner with Data Science & Analytics to push a bold, agentic data platform vision and drive real impact across the organization.

You will build data APIs, semantic layers, and real-time data products, while shaping observability, governance, and MCP strategy to enable AI agents and human analysts to query and

Qualifications

• 10+ years in data engineering, data platform, or infrastructure roles incl. 5+ years in director-level leadership.
• Proven track record building and scaling data platforms (ingestion, warehousing, semantic/metrics layers) at SaaS scale.
• Experience leading through organizational change (reorgs, consolidations, multi-team integrations).
• Demonstrated success partnering with Data Science / Analytics leadership as a peer stakeholder.
• Strong track record hiring, developing, and retaining engineering managers and senior ICs.
• Excellent cross-functional communication skills, with ability to present technical vision to executives.
• A related technical degree is required.

Responsibilities

• Architect data layers for AI agents, designing data APIs, MCP servers, and semantic interfaces.
• Transform semantic layer from human-query to machine-readable knowledge with governance and NL access patterns.
• Build real-time data products with sub-second latency for agent decision-making.
• Ship agentic analytics tooling enabling AI agents to draft queries, detect anomalies, and surface insights.
• Establish AI-native observability with OpenTelemetry GenAI conventions and cost attribution.
• Drive the Data MCP strategy, exposing data assets to AI agents via MCP servers.

Skills

Data platform leadership

Cross-functional leadership

Executive communication

Hiring & mentoring

SaaS data engineering

Data engineering

AI/ML data handling

Education

Related technical degree

Tools

MCP servers

OpenTelemetry GenAI

LLM data integration

Job description

Job Category

Software Engineering

Job Details

About Salesforce

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.

AI agents - both the ones we ship to customers and the ones our engineers use to build Slack - are fundamentally changing how data gets created, queried, and acted upon.

We are seeking a leader who can transform our data platform stack from a traditional analytics platform into the foundation for agentic analytics (AI agents that autonomously explore, analyze, and surface insights from data) and agentic development (AI-powered engineering tools that use data infrastructure as their backbone).

As Senior Director of Data Platform, you will lead a ~40-person organization and own the full data stack - from infrastructure and ingestion through to data products, semantic layers, and AI-facing data services. You'll partner closely with Data Science & Analytics as a strategic peer while driving a bold technical vision: making Slack's data platform the best-in-class substrate for both human analysts and AI agents. This is not a maintenance role. We're looking for someone who sees the agentic future of data platforms and wants to build it.

What You'll Build (Transform)

• Architect the data layers agents rely on - Design and ship data APIs, MCP servers, and semantic interfaces that let AI agents (Slackbot AI, internal coding agents, customer-built Agentforce agents) query, reason over, and act on Slack's data autonomously
• Transform the semantic layer - Evolve our metrics platform from a human-query tool into a machine-readable knowledge that agents can navigate, with governed metric definitions, lineage, and natural-language access patterns
• Build real-time data products - Move beyond batch analytics to streaming data infrastructure that supports sub-second agent decision-making, real-time experimentation, and low latency retrieval
• Ship agentic analytics tooling - Create the next generation of self-serve analytics where AI agents draft queries, detect anomalies, generate insights, and surface recommendations - replacing manual dashboard-watching with proactive, agent-driven intelligence
• Establish AI-native observability - Instrument the data stack with LLM-aware tracing (OpenTelemetry GenAI conventions), token/cost attribution, and quality metrics that treat AI agents as first-class consumers of data infrastructure
• Drive the Data MCP strategy - Own the vision for how Slack's data warehouse, metrics layer, and analytics tools are exposed to AI agents via MCP servers, making Slack's data the most agent-accessible enterprise dataset in the industry

What You'll Run (Operate)

• Own and unify the Data Platform roadmap across infrastructure, ingestion, data governance, tooling, semantic layer sub-teams
• Serve as the DRI for Data Platform, representing the team and work in leadership planning and resolving cross-team priority conflicts
• Partner directly with the Data Science & Analytics organization - establishing and running an effective operating model
• Set data freshness SLAs, warehouse reliability, and cost optimization standards across ingestion and infrastructure teams and ensure the data platform meets those standards and goals
• Build and scale engineering capacity - hire, develop and retain top EM and senior IC talents
• Champion a strong data platform identity and culture
• Partner with product, infrastructure, and DevXP leadership on cross-cutting initiatives

Minimum 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

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building data platforms that serve AI/ML workloads - not just dashboards and reports, but data infrastructure optimized for model training, feature serving, RAG retrieval, or agent-driven queries
• Hands-on understanding of how LLMs and AI agents consume data - including semantic layers, embeddings, vector search, tool-use patterns (MCP, function calling), and structured vs. unstructured data access
• Experience with agentic systems, AI-assisted analytics, or building developer tools powered by AI (e.g., AI coding assistants, automated data quality, natural-language-to-SQL)
• Track record shipping data-as-a-product - APIs