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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.

Principal Architect, Platform Identity

The Mission

We are seeking a distinguished Principal Architect to serve as the definitive technical authority for the Salesforce Identity Platform. This is a high-gravity leadership role for an architect who excels at the intersection of global trust systems and immediate operational delivery.

You are the primary engine of identity integrity, ensuring that contemporary authentication and authorization designs are hardened, near-term releases are seamless, and the multi-year roadmap for Agentic Identity is an operational reality. You will traverse the strategic and the tactical, harmonizing Identity efforts across the enterprise and establishing unified, elegant architectural patterns that secure billions of global transactions.

Key Responsibilities

Identity Domain Precision & Delivery

• Advanced AuthN/AuthZ Frameworks: Translate sophisticated trust requirements into elegant, production-ready architectures. You will author the definitive technical frameworks for modern authentication flows, granular authorization, and secure session management for accelerated delivery cycles.

• Identity Protocol Stewardship & Agentic Evolution: Serve as the final arbiter for high-stakes Identity initiatives. You will lead the implementation of modern industry standards while pioneering the frameworks for Agentic Identity, ensuring that autonomous agents can authenticate and operate with the same level of trust and security as human users.

• Cryptographic & Resilience Governance: Lead the technical oversight of the platform’s most sensitive pathways, including Key Management, mTLS, and Token Exchange services.Through rigorous design governance, you will ensure every implementation is hardened for high-concurrency demands and maintains the highest standards of security integrity.

• Identity-First Decisioning: Navigate the balance between immediate feature delivery and long-term platform health. You will provide high-context, rapid decision-making on complex Customer Identity & Access Management challenges while ensuring the foundational trust architecture remains pristine.

Technical Diplomacy & Global Connectivity

• Identity Ecosystem Harmonization: Act as the primary technical bridge between senior leadership and cross-functional engineering domains. You ensure that identity lifecycles across diverse products (e.g., Core, Slack, Tableau, Agentforce) are cohesive, frictionless, and interoperable.

• Consensus Engineering for Trust: Navigate complex organizational landscapes to align stakeholders on a singular Identity vision—balancing the need for developer agility with the uncompromising requirements of enterprise-grade security.

• Institutionalizing Unified Identity Standards: Partner with senior leadership to replace ad-hoc integration models with repeatable, standardized Identity-as-a-Service patterns. You will establish the frameworks that allow disparate clouds to inherit core security and identity controls autonomously.

• Identity-Product Synthesis: Work closely with  stakeholders to refine nebulous requirements into achievable technical milestones, ensuring every identity feature is sustainable and aligned with global engineering capacity.

Long-Range Planning & Technical Sovereignty

• Strategic Identity Roadmap: Lead Long-Range Planning (LRP) initiatives and author the "North Star" papers that define the evolution of Zero-Trust, Verifiable Credentials, and Agentic Identity frameworks.

• Global Standard Stewardship: Influence the trajectory of global identity standards and specifications, ensuring tactical decisions made today align with the future of the global identity landscape.

• Identity Consistency & Audit: Establish and enforce architectural principles across the Identity domain, evaluating emerging designs to ensure a consistent security posture and user experience across all Salesforce clouds.

• Horizon Scanning: Proactively evaluate emerging shifts—such as decentralized identity or AI-driven fraud detection—to determine their impact on the Salesforce ecosystem.

Cultivating Technical Gravity & Innovation

• Mentorship & Intellectual Leadership: Serve as a force multiplier for the organization by providing high-impact coaching to senior architects, raising the collective bar for Identity engineering across Salesforce.

• Evangelizing Modern Engineering Craft: Act as a champion for the adoption of evolving AI-augmented coding tools. You will lead the effort to integrate these technologies into our engineering culture, demonstrating how AI can enhance architectural consistency and accelerate the delivery of secure, high-quality identity services.

The Profile We Are Looking For

• Exceptional Technical Execution: A track record of delivering massive, sophisticated Identity and Security projects at global scale. You are recognized as the leader who "finishes the job" when architectural complexity requires a steady hand.

• Identity Sovereignty: Expert-level mastery of the modern identity stack, including deep-tier Authentication and Authorization patterns. You don't just use standards; you understand their deep implementation details and how they behave under extreme load.

• Operational Agility: The ability to pivot seamlessly. You can spend the morning resolving a critical mTLS handshake detail and the afternoon drafting a multi-year strategic evolution for Agentic Identity.

• The "Bridge" Intuition: You have a natural ability to spot misalignment across technical domains and the professional "gravity" to pull organizations together toward a unified Identity standard.

Why Join Us?

In our world, Identity is the foundational bedrock of global commerce and the definitive boundary of enterprise trust. Here, your architectural leadership transcends theory; it secures and powers billions of real-time transactions across the world's most sophisticated cloud ecosystem. This role offers a singular opportunity to resolve the intricate technical challenges of a global platform today while pioneering the architectural standards for the Agentic era tomorrow. If you are a builder who takes pride in elegant, shipping implementation and seeks the professional gravity of a role where technical integrity is the primary currency, join us to build the future of trust.

Unleash Your Potential

When you join Salesforce, you’ll be limitless in all areas of your life. Our benefits and resources support you to find balance and be your best, and our AI agents accelerate your impact so you can do your best. Together, we’ll bring the power of Agentforce to organizations of all sizes and deliver amazing experiences that customers love. Apply today to not only shape the future — but to redefine what’s possible — for yourself, for AI, and the world.

Accommodations

If you need a reasonable accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please submit a request via this Accommodations Request Form.

Please note that Salesforce uses artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help our recruiters assess and evaluate candidates’ resumes and qualifications throughout the recruiting process. Humans will always make any candidate selection and hiring decisions. Please see our Candidate Privacy Statement for more information about how we use your personal data and your rights, including with regard to use of AI tools and opt out options.

Posting Statement

Salesforce is an equal opportunity employer and maintains a policy of non-discrimination with all employees and applicants for employment. What does that mean exactly? It means that at Salesforce, we believe in equality for all. And we believe we can lead the path to equality in part by creating a workplace that’s inclusive, and free from discrimination. Know your rights: workplace discrimination is illegal. Any employee or potential employee will be assessed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications – without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression or identity, transgender status, age, disability, veteran or marital status, political viewpoint, or other classifications protected by law. This policy applies to current and prospective employees, no matter where they are in their Salesforce employment journey. It also applies to recruiting, hiring, job assignment, compensation, promotion, benefits, training, assessment of job performance, discipline, termination, and everything in between. Recruiting, hiring, and promotion decisions at Salesforce are fair and based on merit. The same goes for compensation, benefits, promotions, transfers, reduction in workforce, recall, training, and education.

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.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.

At Salesforce, we believe in equitable compensation practices that reflect the dynamic nature of labor markets across various regions.

The typical base salary range for this position is $257,500 - $451,700 annually. In select cities within the San Francisco and New York City metropolitan area, the base salary range for this role is $310,200 - $496,400 annually.

The range represents base salary only, and does not include company bonus, incentive for sales roles, equity or benefits, as applicable.