Salesforce Architect
Summary
Lead end-to-end technical architecture and solution design for Salesforce implementations across Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Experience Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Revenue Cloud, involving integration design, data architecture, security, and DevOps.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead the end-to-end technical architecture and solution design for Salesforce implementations, enhancements, and transformation initiatives.
- Translate complex business and functional requirements into scalable, maintainable, and secure Salesforce technical solutions.
- Define Salesforce architecture across Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Experience Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Revenue Cloud and other relevant Salesforce capabilities based on project requirements.
- Lead architecture and technical discovery workshops with customers, business stakeholders, functional consultants, and technical teams.
- Design and document solution architecture, system architecture, integration architecture, data models, security architecture, and technical specifications.
- Determine the appropriate balance between Salesforce declarative capabilities and programmatic development.
- Provide technical leadership across Apex, Lightning Web Components (LWC), Visualforce, triggers, asynchronous processing, APIs and platform services.
- Design enterprise integrations between Salesforce and external applications using REST/SOAP APIs, middleware, event-driven architecture, ETL and integration platforms.
- Define integration patterns, data flows, API strategies, error handling, monitoring, authentication, and performance considerations.
- Design scalable data architecture and data migration strategies, including data modelling, data quality, transformation, cleansing, loading, and large data volume considerations.
- Architect Salesforce security solutions covering profiles, permission sets, roles, sharing rules, role hierarchy, field-level security, object-level security, identity, SSO and access management.
- Ensure solutions comply with enterprise security, privacy, governance, and regulatory requirements.
- Define and enforce Salesforce architecture standards, design patterns, coding standards, integration standards, and best practices.
- Review technical designs, code, integrations, data models, and deployment strategies produced by development teams.
- Identify technical risks, platform limitations, performance bottlenecks, dependencies, and architectural gaps and recommend mitigation strategies.
- Provide guidance on Salesforce governor limits, scalability, performance optimization, transaction management, and high-volume data environments.
- Lead technical planning for CI/CD, source control, environment strategy, release management, testing, deployment, and rollback procedures.
- Work with DevOps teams to establish appropriate Salesforce deployment and release management processes.
- Define technical testing strategies covering unit, integration, system, regression, performance, security, and deployment testing.
- Support proof-of-concepts and prototypes for complex technical requirements.
- Mentor and provide technical direction to Salesforce developers, consultants, and engineering teams.
- Participate in effort estimation, technical feasibility assessments, solution options, and project planning.
- Support pre-sales activities including technical presentations, solutioning, architecture proposals, RFP/RFI responses, demonstrations, and customer discussions.
- Communicate complex technical concepts, architectural decisions, risks, and trade-offs effectively to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Ensure solutions are designed for long-term maintainability, scalability, extensibility, and operational support.
Required Technical Skills
Salesforce Platform
- Strong hands-on experience with Salesforce architecture and platform capabilities.
- Strong knowledge of Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud.
- Good understanding of Experience Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Revenue Cloud/CPQ or other Salesforce clouds is an advantage.
- Strong knowledge of Salesforce platform limits, scalability, performance, and architectural design patterns.
- Strong understanding of declarative and programmatic Salesforce capabilities.
Development
- Strong experience with Apex, Apex Triggers, Lightning Web Components (LWC), Visualforce and asynchronous Apex.
- Knowledge of Salesforce APIs and platform development frameworks.
- Understanding of object-oriented programming and common design patterns.
- Experience reviewing and guiding enterprise-level Salesforce development.
Integration
- Strong experience designing Salesforce integration architecture.
- Hands-on understanding of REST, SOAP, Bulk API, Platform Events and other Salesforce integration capabilities.
- Experience with middleware/integration platforms such as MuleSoft, Boomi, Azure Integration Services, Informatica or equivalent is preferred.
- Understanding of synchronous, asynchronous, event-driven, batch and near-real-time integration patterns.
Data Architecture
- Strong understanding of Salesforce data modelling and relational data concepts.
- Experience with complex data migration and integration initiatives.
- Knowledge of ETL tools and data transformation techniques.
- Understanding of Large Data Volume (LDV) architecture and performance considerations.
Security & Identity
- Strong understanding of Salesforce security architecture.
- Experience with profiles, permission sets, roles, sharing rules, sharing sets, field-level security and record-level security.
- Knowledge of SSO, OAuth, SAML, identity providers and enterprise identity/access management.
- Ability to design secure Salesforce solutions for internal and external users.
DevOps & Delivery
- Experience with Salesforce CI/CD, source control and release management.
- Familiarity with Salesforce DX, Git and automated deployment pipelines.
- Experience with tools such as Copado, Gearset, Jenkins, Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions is preferred.
- Strong understanding of Salesforce environments, sandbox strategy and deployment governance.
Qualifications & Experience
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related discipline.
- 8+ years of experience in software/application development and enterprise technology.
- 5+ years of hands-on Salesforce experience, with significant experience in architecture and technical leadership.
- 3+ years in a Salesforce Architect / Technical Architect / Solution Architect role.
- Proven experience delivering complex Salesforce implementations involving multiple systems and integrations.
- Experience leading technical teams and guiding developers through complex architecture and implementation challenges.
- Strong experience across the complete software development lifecycle.
- Experience working directly with enterprise customers and senior stakeholders.
- Strong understanding of architectural principles, design patterns, integration patterns, security, data architecture, and cloud technologies.
Preferred Certifications
- Salesforce Certified Technical Architect (CTA) – highly preferred.
- Salesforce Certified Application Architect.
- Salesforce Certified System Architect.
- Salesforce Certified Platform Integration Architect.
- Salesforce Certified Platform Data Architect.
- Salesforce Certified Platform Identity and Access Management Architect.
- Salesforce Certified Platform Sharing and Visibility Architect.
- Relevant Salesforce Developer certifications.