Do you have real world Salesforce experience and wish to advance your career to the next level?

What if you were empowered to solve the most complex challenges that higher education institutions face today? What if you had the latest and best cloud and Artificial Intelligence technology to achieve that goal? What if you could work for a company that believes that top-line growth is as important as giving back to the community? What if you could work alongside the best and brightest in the industry to craft innovative solutions and transformational strategies? All this in a driven, collaborative and rewarding environment… Sounds like fiction, you say? Absolutely not! Here at Salesforce, we call it the Salesforce Ohana; our core cultural principle that emphasizes building a supportive environment of shared responsibility.

Job Description:

The Education Cloud Architect is a customer-facing education domain advisor applying broad technical skills, with deep industry knowledge and business acumen. In this role, you will support sales teams in developing compelling Salesforce value propositions that align to our higher education customers’ business strategies on digital transformation and cloud adoption.

What are the characteristics that will make you successful in this role?

• Inquisitive - You are naturally inquisitive, a constant self-learner and have a high aptitude for gathering information and asking good questions about your customers. You have a keen interest in learning and applying the latest capabilities such as Artificial Intelligence to solve customer challenges

• Collaborative - You work well with other stakeholders on challenges, you understand their objectives, and you surface capabilities that address their objectives. You draw from other team members' expertise when needed, and offer your own expertise to others whenever you can

• Trustworthy and Authentic - You listen and respond transparently, building trust and becoming a valued advisor

• Accountable - You focus on journeys and outcomes. You break down transformational journeys into logical and achievable steps, and focus on accomplishing the next step

• Resilient - You respond to setbacks in the moment, and use your experiences to anticipate potential setbacks on the horizon

You have subject matter experience in categories that may include: business strategy, application architecture, application integration, security, cloud computing, distributed platforms, mobile platforms, and business intelligence/analytics. With a solid blend of technical and sales skills you use a consultative approach to understand business and technical requirements.

• Partner with account executives and solution engineers to advance opportunities through discovery workshops, enablement sessions, and architecture presentations; includes ~25% travel

• Define customer-driven architectures by selecting appropriate Salesforce technologies, leveraging product expertise, industry experience, EA frameworks, and Salesforce methodologies. Develop and communicate business architecture (vision, capability models/assessments) and technical architecture (current/future state diagrams, roadmaps, design patterns, and reference architectures) to progress sales opportunities

• Apply broad IT expertise—including solution and technical architecture, systems engineering cloud, governance, and SDLC—to lead discussions on business and technical transformation

• Support sales teams by contributing to RFP responses and technical requirement documents

• At sponsored events, deliver best practices, reference architectures, and educational content for customers, partners, and Salesforce teams; collaborate cross-functionally with alliances, product, and industry groups

• Stay current through required product, sales, and procedural training and certifications

• Lead technical due diligence and risk management for customer engagements

• Meet assigned quarterly and annual performance objectives

This role is aligned to the Global Public Sector Business Unit, which includes US and Canada higher education institutions and systems integrators. These prospects and customers are often in digital optimization or digital transformation phases. Salesforce typically has alignment with key customer C-level executives as partners on digital transformation engagements.

Your Impact

• You understand and speak the language of the business, and help bridge between business requirements and Salesforce capabilities

• You are a trusted advisor to CIO/CTO/EA level contacts and their teams as they look to move or expand their business to a cloud architecture

• You earn the trust of prospects' and customers’ university stakeholders: provosts, CIOs, VPs of enrollment/advancement, registrars and similar

• You drive product vision and direction by helping advise our Product Management on key capabilities

• You become a true asset to Salesforce due to broad and deep knowledge of business and technical architecture across all relevant domain
  

Minimum Qualifications:

• Experience working with Salesforce solutions and the Salesforce Platform

• B.S. Computer Science, Software Engineering or equivalent work experience

• 5+ years experience in enterprise software implementation, system integration or enterprise architecture disciplines

• Good understanding of the architectural principles of cloud based platforms including SaaS, PaaS, multitenancy, multi-tiered infrastructure, etc.

• Good understanding of the security processes, standards & issues involved in multi-tier cloud or hybrid applications

• Familiar with principles of network, application and information security

• Conceptual and tactical understanding of enterprise application integration such as SOA, ESB, EAI, ETL environments and common EA topics such as process orchestration, BPM, CEP, Master Data Management, BI/BA, etc.

• Able to grasp leading edge technologies such as generative and predictive Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Robotic Process Automation, etc.

• Articulate and balanced in demeanor with crisp written and verbal communication skills
  

Preferred Qualifications:

• Familiar with Salesforce Industry solutions such as Public Sector Solutions and Education Cloud

• Salesforce related implementation experience (Force.com, Apex, Java or C#, JavaScript), mobile development, modern frameworks, REST, SOAP/WSDL, and API-driven integration

• Familiar with AI technologies, ideally Salesforce Agentforce AI, but may include other technologies such as Palantir

• Experience architecting Agentforce extension points into existing orgs (e.g., adding agentic layers to established Salesforce implementations)

• Familiarity with Data Cloud as a prerequisite for Agentforce use cases

• Experience with agent observability and tuning — using case history and observability tooling to refine agent performance

• Familiar with third party Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Providers such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud

• Familiar with solution selling, experience in sales/pre-sales a plus