VP, Software Engineering

salesforce.com, inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 300,000 - 460,000; Full time

Job summary

Salesforce seeks a senior software engineering executive to lead Delivery & Excellence across a large-scale cloud platform. You will own practices, standards, and capabilities that elevate quality, reliability, productivity, performance, cost efficiency, and security, with a focus on AI-driven improvements.

As EVP-level leader, you will unify governance, tooling, and cross-team standards, partner with Product Development and EngOps, and drive measurable outcomes while delivering world-class

Qualifications

• 15+ years of engineering leadership at scale.
• Experience leading cross-functional product and platform teams.
• Proven ability to elevate standards and operational maturity.
• Strong background in enterprise SaaS, performance, security, and reliability.

Responsibilities

• Lead cross-platform functions of Delivery & Excellence at Salesforce.
• Establish strategy, principles, and operating mechanisms for engineering quality and delivery excellence.
• Oversee domains for performance, quality, availability, security, accessibility, and cost to serve.
• Partner with Product Development and EngOps to align health metrics with operating rhythm.
• Recruit, develop, and retain senior technical leaders; drive a culture of rigor and continuous improvement.

Skills

Executive leadership

Cross-Platform leadership

AI integration

Cloud/SaaS architecture

Operational excellence

Education

15+ years engineering leadership

Tools

DevOps tooling

SRE practices

Job description

Overview

Salesforce is the #1 AI CRM. The company emphasizes AI, innovation with core values, and a culture of Trailblazers. This role is part of Agentforce and the opportunity is to contribute to Salesforce’s AI-driven, enterprise SaaS platform.

About the Role

A senior software engineering executive will lead cross‑platform functions of Delivery & Excellence. This role is designed for a senior technology leader who balances 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 practices, standards, and organizational capabilities that elevate quality, reliability, productivity, performance, cost efficiency, and security posture across Platform engineering. This leadership role focuses on the engineering-wide ilities—Performance, Quality, Availability, Productivity, Cost to Serve, Security, and Accessibility—and ensures these are durable, measured disciplines across Platform Engineering. A focus on applying AI and agents to improve these disciplines is fundamental to the charter and mission.

In some domains you will directly lead an operating organization with technical ownership; in others you will oversee smaller teams responsible for governance, tooling, and oversight. You will align and drive frameworks, processes, and technical direction to ensure every product team across Platform Engineering meets a high bar for operational and engineering excellence. You will partner with fellow executives in Product Development and report to the EVP. You will be a key member of the platform engineering leadership team and a representative of these functions to the broader company. This role is a change agent who can set vision, influence peers, operationalize excellence at scale, and deliver measurable outcomes.

What You'll Do

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 foundational disciplines embraced by every team across Platform.

• Provide frameworks, standards, and tooling for these functions while allowing individual Platform teams to tailor them to their needs.

• 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, tooling strategy, consulting, and cross‑team enablement.

Partner Cross-Functionally to Drive Adoption and Accountability

• Work across Platform leadership to define standards and ensure consistent, high‑quality execution across all products.

• Collaborate with cloud‑level COOs and EngOps to align Platform's health metrics with the broader operating rhythm.

• Collaborate with leadership groups outside Platform (Office of Accessibility, Globalization, Product Security, etc.).

• Influence, align, and enforce engineering‑wide norms while building trust with peer organizations reporting 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 Developer Experience teams to support Platform's CI/CD, test automation, and environment requirements.

• Introduce clear quality gates, reliability KPIs, and engineering scorecards for transparency and accountability.

• Focus on developer productivity via process, tools, and techniques; modernize the software development lifecycle with AI tools and best practices.

Uplevel Operational Maturity

• Ensure the platform meets uptime, latency, security resilience, global scale, and end‑to‑end quality requirements.

• Partner with SRE, Architecture, Product, and Security to prevent incidents and reduce operational friction.

Represent Engineering Excellence to the Company

• Serve as the executive advocate for engineering quality, performance, security posture, accessibility commitments, and operational readiness.

• Communicate priorities, tradeoffs, and status to executive leadership and customer‑facing teams.

Engage With and Be the Voice of Customers

• Meet with customers to understand issues regarding quality, availability, and scalability to influence product and engineering roadmap decisions.

• Share insights with product and engineering teams to drive prioritization.

Build a High‑Impact, High‑Trust Organization

• Recruit, develop, and retain deeply skilled technical leaders across domains.

• Instill a culture of rigor, metrics, accountability, and continuous improvement.

• Lead with empathy, clarity, and a passion for helping engineering teams do their best work.

Initial Areas / Initiatives to Lead

These are major areas of cross‑platform scope requiring executive ownership:

• Performance Engineering Transformation: building the performance org, platform‑wide standards, and systemic improvements across services.

• Quality and Test Modernization (Q3): uplifting test strategy, tooling, automation, and release readiness standards.

• Availability & Reliability Operating Model: defining availability SLAs, error budgets, incident prevention, and reliability processes.

• Cost to Serve Reduction: reducing operational costs through architecture and collaboration with infrastructure and product teams.

• Security Readiness & Compliance: governance across authentication/authorization, secure SDLC, vulnerability remediation, and cross‑product security posture.

• Accessibility Engineering Standards: ensuring accessibility alignment and enabling product teams with guidance and tooling.

• Developer Productivity: ensuring best‑in‑class developer productivity, tooling, and SDLC improvements, with AI as a central element.

Each area above may involve delivering common tooling, frameworks, and evaluation methodologies at scale.

Preferred Qualifications and Experience

• 15+ years of engineering leadership experience, including executive‑level leadership of cross‑functional teams.

• Experience influencing shared engineering services, operational excellence, or cross‑platform disciplines.

• Proven ability to elevate standards and operational maturity across large, distributed organizations.

• Deep understanding of enterprise SaaS ilities, including:

• Performance engineering and optimization

• Quality engineering and automation

• Availability, SLO/SLI, incident management, DR

• Cloud cost optimization and governance

• Security engineering, app security lifecycle, and compliance

• Accessibility standards and implementation practices

• Experience in frameworks such as DevOps/DevEx, SRE, secure SDLC, quality engineering at scale, and performance maturity models.

• A bias for action, grounded judgment, and a focus on measurable outcomes.

• A passion for building scalable, secure, and inclusive engineering systems.

Unleash Your Potential

When you join Salesforce, you’ll be limitless in all areas of your life. Our benefits support balance and growth, and our AI agents accelerate impact so you can do your best. Salesforce aims to bring Agentforce to organizations of all sizes and deliver experiences customers love.

Equal Opportunity and Accommodations

Salesforce is an equal opportunity employer. If you need a reasonable accommodation during the application or recruiting process, please submit a request via the Accommodations Request Form. Salesforce uses AI tools to assist recruiters in evaluating resumes; humans make final hiring decisions. See the Candidate Privacy Statement for details on data usage and opt-out options.

Posting Statement: Salesforce is committed to non‑discrimination and an inclusive workplace. The typical base salary range is provided; actual compensation is location and role dependent. Benefits include medical, dental, vision, mental health support, parental leave, life and disability insurance, 401(k), and an employee stock purchase program. Details at the Salesforce benefits site.