Description
The Success Architect team within Cloud Success is home to Salesforce’s most skilled subject matter experts across products, programs, and processes. As a leader on this team, you will play a pivotal role in shaping strategy, managing team capacity, aligning with key stakeholders, and enabling scalable impact across our customer base. In this leadership position, you will be responsible for leading the operational cadence of the Success Architect function. You will ensure optimal capacity planning and resource alignment across a portfolio of critical initiatives and high-impact customer engagements within Service Cloud. By driving prioritization and balancing workload across the team, you will maximize effectiveness and prevent burnout, while maintaining a laser focus on quality and value delivery. You will lead a high-performing team that serves as the connective tissue between Cloud Success Group (CSG) Field, Go-To-Market (GTM) teams, and Product & Technology stakeholders. Your team will deliver architectural thought leadership and technical strategy guidance for Salesforce’s most complex products and customer solutions. This is a highly visible leadership role requiring a strategic mindset, operational rigor, and a passion for coaching high-impact teams. You will be instrumental in driving Salesforce's customer success vision and building a resilient, knowledgeable, and future-proof Success Architect organization.
Responsibilities:
- Excellence in Execution: Define and enforce delivery frameworks, architectural governance, and quality standards to ensure best-in-class project success rates and predictability.
- People Leadership and Development: Recruit, hire, and onboard a diverse team of technical resources who possess both problem-solving grit and consultative soft skills. Mentor your team on how to context-switch effectively.
- High-Performance Culture: Actively contribute to recruiting and onboarding the best talent, fostering a high-performance culture based on accountability, collaboration, and a relentless pursuit of excellence.
- Architect Mentorship: Drive the coaching, mentoring, and career development of the Service Cloud Success Architect, cultivating the next generation of technical leaders and elevating the organization's overall architectural competency.
- Manage intake and execution of the Success Architect engagements that drive success and improvements in technical health across Salesforce Signature customers.
- Oversee team capacity across strategic workstreams; balance high-priority requests with long-term planning to ensure efficient deployment of expertise and timely delivery.
- Continuously assess and evolve team capabilities; drive targeted skill development, succession planning, and onboarding programs to ensure the team remains future-ready.
- Act as an escalation point for high severity customer issues that arise from within the team; directly from customers or from other Salesforce functions.
Requirements and Skills:
- Strong communication skills, both written and verbal. Clear, concise communication of complex technical ideas and business strategy.
- Strong presentation skills. Confidently represent the team and strategy in executive forums and customer engagements.
- Proven ability to manage schedules, shifts, and capacity planning. You should be comfortable using data to argue for resources or process changes.
- Skilled at engaging and aligning with senior leaders across Product, Engineering, Sales, Services, and Success.
- An understanding of enterprise-grade systems, Salesforce cloud platforms, integrations, and scalable architecture patterns.
- Experience leading and growing high-performing, technical teams with a focus on coaching, upskilling, and succession planning.
- Strong collaboration and negotiation skills to drive outcomes in a matrixed environment.
- Demonstrated experience with Salesforce products, capabilities, and customer success methodology.
- Familiarity with well-architected standards and best practices.
- Ability to represent technical concepts and product vision to diverse audiences (field, partners, customers, execs).
- Demonstrated experience and a strong philosophical orientation toward the future of work and the integration of AI Agents (Digital Labor) and automation into business processes.
Minimum Qualifications:
- 13+ years of experience in Customer Success, Solution Architecture, Technical Consulting, or related fields.
- 5+ years of people management or leadership experience, including managing high-performing technical teams and change management/transformation initiatives.
- Proven experience managing capacity and resource planning across complex portfolios or customer engagements.
- Demonstrated success in driving cross-functional alignment with Product, Sales, Services, and Engineering teams.
- Experience leading high-priority initiatives or programs with executive visibility and business-critical outcomes.
- Strong technical knowledge of Salesforce products and platform - features, capabilities, best practices and how to deploy, including knowledge of the Salesforce ecosystem
- Strong analytical and operational abilities, especially around team performance, prioritization, and efficiency.