Salesforce Architect
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.