Principal Forward Deployed Engineer - Data 360

About the role

Salesforce is hiring Forward Deployed Engineers focused on Data 360, its real-time data engine that unifies data from any source. You will be a hands-on Technical Builder who configures, builds, tests and deploys Data 360 directly inside enterprise customer environments, turning approved solution designs into working implementations. This is a hands-on data and software engineering role, not a purely declarative or advisory one.

Key responsibilities

• Configure and develop in customer sandboxes and production, following security, change-management and release controls
• Build ingestion, harmonization and identity resolution pipelines, and materialize data views tuned for application, analytical and agentic workloads
• Create test data and validate outcomes across happy paths, edge cases, access boundaries and failure conditions
• Design and maintain the AI data integration layer: RAG, vector databases, search indexes and knowledge bases
• Implement agent communication protocols such as Model Context Protocol (MCP) and agent-to-agent communication
• Apply data governance principles and secure authentication and authorization (OAuth, SAML)
• Troubleshoot ingestion failures, schema drift, identity anomalies, query behavior and API errors
• Document trade-offs, recommend implementations, pair with customer teams, package reusable artifacts and hand off to production

Required profile

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering or technical implementation, including a production data solution you can explain in detail
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience
• Hands-on experience implementing Salesforce Data 360 (Data Cloud) or a comparable enterprise data platform
• Experience building data pipelines and integrations with platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift, Kafka or an MDM platform
• Experience building retrieval systems for AI applications (vector databases, search indexes, knowledge bases)

Required skills

• Proficiency in SQL
• Fluency in Apex, Java, Python or JavaScript/TypeScript
• Data modeling, APIs, batch and streaming processing, and the differences between copied, federated and Zero Copy data access
• Secure service-to-service integration patterns (OAuth, SAML) and emerging agent protocols like MCP