Software Engineering Architect — Digital Marketing Technology

Description The Experience

The Digital Marketing Technology organization powers Salesforce’s global digital presence, serving as “Customer Zero” for our own products — Salesforce, Informatica.com, MulesSoft.com, and Tableau.com — across Content, Identity, and Event experiences. Events Technology is the engine behind Salesforce’s flagship and regional events — including Dreamforce, TrailblazerDX, Tableau Conference, Connections, World Tours, and countless webinars and field events — spanning registration, event marketing, attendee personalization, agenda/session management, badge and check-in systems, live streaming, and post-event video on demand and reporting.

We are seeking a Software Engineering Architect to take on a leadership role for Events Technology. Reporting directly to the VP of Engineering, you will own the architectural strategy and architectural coherence for the event technology ecosystem — from registration and attendee experience through agenda management, event marketing, and on-site/virtual delivery — ensuring these systems operate as a unified, scalable platform that drives event business value at the scale of Dreamforce and beyond.

In this role, you are a strategic partner to Product Leads, Engineering, and Event Marketing. You should have the ability to (if needed) dive deep into code and configuration — prototyping complex flows (e.g., registration and personalization workflows, AgentGraph-driven attendee assistance) and validating architectural decisions through hands-on reference implementations. You will serve as the architectural bridge between Product, Engineering, and event marketing, influencing the roadmap of the Salesforce products we consume by providing high-fidelity feedback based on our internal implementations at event scale.

What You'll Actually Be Doing

• Horizontal Architectural Strategy for Events Technology. Define and drive the software architecture vision across the events technology portfolio. You will be responsible for ensuring architectural integrity and integration across domains including, but not limited to:
• Event Platforms: Registration, attendee management, agenda/session builders, badge & check-in, capacity and waitlist management for large-scale events (Dreamforce, TrailblazerDX, World Tours).
• AI & Agents: Agentforce (Atlas/AgentGraph), conversational agents for attendee support, and digital labor applied to event operations.
• Data & Identity: Data Cloud (Ingestion/Activation), Identity Resolution, Unified Attendee Profiles, and OAuth2/TBID for event authentication.
• Marketing & Orchestration: Event Journey Orchestration, Messaging Services (email/SMS/push for event communications), and Transactional Services.
• Core Platform: Web Application Development for event sites, Headless CMS for event content, Knowledge Graphs, Federated Graphs (GraphQL), and Streaming/ML integrations for real-time event analytics.
• Strategic Prototyping & Hands-on Leadership. You will validate high-stakes architectural decisions through hands-on prototyping and code-level deep dives. You are expected to build “walking skeleton” implementations of new technologies (e.g., deterministic Agentforce workflows for attendee check-in or session recommendations) to educate leadership on technical choices and set clear patterns for engineering teams to follow, without becoming a bottleneck for critical path delivery — especially given the hard, immovable deadlines of live events.
• Engineering Multiplier. Shift from individual “hero” delivery to enabling the broader engineering organization. You will empower event engineering teams by establishing architectural standards, conducting design reviews, and resolving cross-team technical blockers ahead of high-traffic event moments (registration launches, keynotes, on-site check-in surges). You will operate as a peer and consensus-builder to architects in adjacent verticals, driving alignment on standards without requiring direct managerial authority.
• Cross-Pillar & Product Collaboration
• Product Strategy: Partner with Product Leads across Events, Marketing, and DMT to align technical capabilities with 3-4 quarter event and roadmap calendars.
• DET Alignment: Collaborate with architects in the broader Digital Enterprise Technology across pillars to drive DET-wide initiatives and common architecture patterns, ensuring event technology stays aligned with enterprise-wide standards.
• Product Feedback Loop (Customer Zero). Maintain deep technical engagement with T&P teams (specifically Agentforce, Sales Cloud, Data Cloud, and Marketing Cloud). You will be the architecture voice of Events Technology, running the highest-scale, highest-visibility events on Salesforce’s own products, and providing feedback on APIs, limits, and capabilities to improve the products before they reach external customers.

You're Our Person If...

• 12+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• 5+ years in an architectural role, designing distributed systems at enterprise scale.
• Broad Domain Expertise: Demonstrated experience architecting solutions that span multiple technical domains relevant to event technology. Must have specific exposure to or understanding of: Data Cloud, Agentforce/AI Agents, Marketing Journey Orchestration, Identity, Content Management, and event/registration platforms.
• Event Technology Experience: Direct experience with event registration, attendee management, agenda/session tooling, or ticketing platforms — ideally at large scale (thousands to tens of thousands of concurrent attendees) and under fixed, non-negotiable event-date deadlines.
• Hands-on Proficiency: Ability to read and write code/config when necessary to validate designs. Comfortable spinning up a POC to prove a point or debugging a complex integration issue to unblock a team, particularly under the time pressure of an upcoming event launch.
• Strategic Influence: Proven ability to influence Product Leads and Engineering Leadership (Directors/VPs). Ability to articulate the trade-offs between “building right” (long-term health) and “building fast” (market and event-date demands).
• Salesforce Ecosystem: Expert-level understanding of Salesforce platform capabilities, specifically regarding Data Cloud ingestion patterns and Agentforce architectures.
• Experience in building scalable applications based on micro-service architecture in public cloud infrastructure, able to withstand event-day traffic spikes: AWS components like API Gateway, Lambdas, SNS, SQS, ElastiCache, AppSync etc.
• Experience in building Conversational agents, Co-Pilots, and Autonomous agents for attendee-facing use cases, familiarity with Large language models.
• Experience in building integrations and pipelines to AWS SageMaker ML platform.
• Experience with Data streams at high scale (Apache Kafka, Kinesis), especially for real-time event and check-in data.
• Knowledge of NoSQL databases (DynamoDB) and Graph databases (Neo4j, Neptune).
• Experience in working in teams with Agile software delivery and DevOps practices.
• Well-versed with CI/CD principles, and experience in solving issues in a distributed services ecosystem, including load and scale testing ahead of a major event.
• Experience mentoring lead engineers.
• Ability to evaluate a problem space and make a technology decision based on what’s best for the event attendee and customer.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills to effectively collaborate with both business (event marketing) and technical customers.
• AI Proficiency & Fluency: Hands-on fluency with modern AI tooling — using LLMs/copilots for code generation, debugging, and design exploration as part of your own daily workflow — plus working knowledge of prompt engineering and agent orchestration patterns, going beyond simple assistance to designing and evaluating AI-driven workflows and systems.

Even Better If...

• Experience transitioning legacy “service-provider” models into scalable “product-led” engineering organizations.
• Experience with Federated GraphQL architectures.
• Direct background in Event Technology, Digital Marketing, or AdTech domains — particularly large-scale conference or field-event platforms.
• Experience with on-site event technology: badge printing/scanning, kiosk check-in, mobile event apps, and real-time capacity/session-fill monitoring.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring, Salesforce will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. In the United States, compensation offered will be determined by factors such as location, job level, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Certain roles may be eligible for incentive compensation, equity, and 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.