Principal Software Engineer/Lead Salesforce

Our Client, a Waste Disposal company, is looking for a Principal Software Engineer/Lead — Salesforce for their Windsor, CT/ Hybrid location.
 
Responsibilities:

• Technical Leadership
• Serve as the principal technical authority for the Salesforce platform.
• Define and govern Salesforce architecture standards, engineering practices, and development frameworks.
• Lead architectural reviews and technical decision-making across Salesforce initiatives.
• Establish platform roadmaps aligned with business and technology objectives.
• Provide technical leadership for large-scale transformational programs and platform enhancements.
• Mentor senior engineers, technical leads, solution architects, and senior administrators.
• Document and defend significant decisions through Architecture Decision Records and design documentation.
• Salesforce Architecture & Solution Design
• Design scalable, secure, and maintainable solutions across the Salesforce ecosystem.
• Establish enterprise architecture patterns for Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Experience Cloud, and custom platform solutions.
• Lead data modeling, security architecture, sharing and visibility strategy, and platform governance.
• Own org strategy — single-org versus multi-org, environment topology, and metadata ownership boundaries.
• Define the decision framework for declarative versus programmatic solutions and enforce it consistently across teams.
• Architect for scale within platform constraints — governor limits, large data volumes, ownership and lookup skew, and query performance.
• Define integration architectures between Salesforce and enterprise applications.
• Evaluate new Salesforce capabilities and determine adoption strategies, including build-versus-configure-versus-buy assessments for AppExchange solutions.
• Platform Engineering & Development
• Lead development using Apex, Lightning Web Components, Flows, Platform Events, and platform services.
• Drive reusable framework development, shared component libraries, and engineering standardization.
• Ensure adherence to secure development and code quality standards, including meaningful test assertions rather than coverage compliance alone.
• Guide engineering teams through complex technical challenges and production escalations.
• Promote scalable development practices, bulkification discipline, and performance optimization.
• Establish standards for the maintenance and retirement of legacy Visualforce, Aura, and deprecated automation frameworks.
• Enterprise Integration
• Design and govern integration solutions using APIs, event-driven architectures, middleware platforms, and messaging technologies.
• Define enterprise integration patterns, API strategy, and canonical data contracts.
• Ensure reliable and secure data exchange between Salesforce and enterprise systems, including [policy administration, claims, billing, data warehouse, and identity platforms].
• Design for API limit management, error handling, idempotency, replay, and reconciliation across integration boundaries.
• Collaborate with enterprise architects to align platform integrations with broader technology strategy.
• Data Architecture & Governance
• Own the Salesforce data model, master data alignment, and system-of-record definitions with enterprise Data Management.
• Define data quality, retention, archival, and large volume strategies.
• Govern data migration and consolidation programs, including cutover and reconciliation approach.
• [Evaluate and guide Salesforce Data Cloud adoption and its relationship to the enterprise data platform, if applicable.]
• Platform Modernization & Innovation
• Lead platform modernization initiatives and technical debt reduction programs.
• Drive migration of retired automation frameworks (Workflow Rules, Process Builder) to Flow, and Aura components to Lightning Web Components.
• Drive adoption of modern Salesforce capabilities and development frameworks.
• Evaluate emerging capabilities — including Einstein, Agent force, Data Cloud, automation, and advanced analytics — and define adoption, guardrail, and evaluation strategy.
• Establish standards for responsible use of AI-assisted development tooling, including review, security, and intellectual property considerations.
• Recommend architectural improvements that enhance business agility and platform scalability.
• DevOps & Operational Excellence
• Establish Salesforce DevOps standards, branching strategy, and deployment practices.
• Drive CI/CD automation, automated regression testing, and release management improvements.
• Promote source-driven development, sandbox and environment strategy, and test data management.
• Own seasonal release readiness — assessing the three annual Salesforce releases for impact, coordinating regression testing, and managing critical update remediation.
• Improve platform observability, reliability, and operational supportability, including event monitoring and proactive limit alerting.
• Partner with Security and Infrastructure teams to ensure compliance and governance requirements are met.
• Security, Risk & Compliance
• Own the Salesforce security architecture — profiles and permission sets, sharing model, field-level security, and least-privilege access design.
• Ensure solutions satisfy applicable regulatory and audit obligations.
• Partner with Information Security on encryption strategy, event monitoring, access certification, and third-party/AppExchange package risk review.
• Contribute to business continuity planning, including backup, recovery, and data restoration strategy — recognizing that native platform recovery capabilities are limited.
• Vendor, Licensing & Cost Management
• Provide technical input into Salesforce license planning, entitlement optimization, and contract renewal cycles.
• Govern AppExchange and third-party package evaluation, security review, and lifecycle management.
• Manage the technical relationship with Salesforce account, architect, and support teams, and with systems integration partners.
• Provide technical oversight of partner and offshore delivery quality against defined standards.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration
• Partner with Product Owners, business stakeholders, enterprise architects, and engineering leaders.
• Translate business objectives into scalable technical solutions, and technical trade-offs into business terms.
• Influence platform investment decisions and technology strategy.
• Communicate complex technical concepts to technical and business audiences, up to and including executive leadership.
• The main function of a phlebotomist is to assist in performing various assigned duties, trouble shooting, training and making work flow recommendations.

• Technologies & Capabilities
• Salesforce Platform (Core)
• Platform architecture; Apex (bulkification, asynchronous patterns, governor limits); Lightning Web Components; Flow and declarative automation; Platform Events; Salesforce APIs (REST, SOAP, Bulk, Streaming, Composite); security and sharing model; data modeling and governance; Visualforce and Aura (legacy maintenance)
• Salesforce Clouds (Core)
• Sales Cloud; Service Cloud; Experience Cloud. Preferred: Financial Services Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Data Cloud, Agentforce/Einstein
• Integration (Core)
• REST and SOAP APIs; event-driven architecture and Change Data Capture; MuleSoft or comparable middleware/ESB; messaging platforms (Kafka, JMS, Azure Service Bus); API management and gateway patterns; authentication (OAuth 2.0, JWT, SAML, mutual TLS); error handling, retry, and reconciliation design
• DevOps & Engineering (Core)
• Salesforce DX and source-driven development; Git branching and release strategy; CI/CD pipelines; deployment tooling (Gearset, Copado, Flosum, or equivalent); automated and regression testing; static code analysis (PMD, Salesforce Code Analyzer); sandbox, environment, and test data strategy
• Architecture (Core)
• Enterprise, integration, security, and data architecture; solution design; distributed systems fundamentals; scalability design within platform constraints; large data volume patterns
• Supporting / Contextual
• Salesforce Shield (encryption, event monitoring); backup and recovery tooling; CRM Analytics; identity and SSO architecture; general-purpose programming outside Apex (e.g., JavaScript, Java, .NET); cloud platform fundamentals (AWS/Azure); [insurance core system integration — Guidewire, Duck Creek, or equivalent]
• Required Qualifications
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field — or equivalent practical experience.
• 15+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• 12+ years of Salesforce platform development and architecture experience — see note below.
• Deep expertise across Salesforce platform capabilities and architecture, including the security and sharing model.
• Demonstrated experience designing enterprise-scale Salesforce solutions in production.
• Strong understanding of software architecture, distributed systems, and integration patterns.
• Hands-on experience designing and governing integrations between Salesforce and enterprise systems.
• Proven ability to lead technical initiatives across multiple teams without direct authority.
• Experience establishing engineering standards, governance practices, and architecture review processes.
• Strong stakeholder management and written and verbal communication skills.
• Preferred Qualifications
• Experience within insurance, financial services, healthcare, or another regulated industry.
• Experience leading enterprise-scale CRM transformation programs end-to-end.
• Experience with platform engineering, developer enablement, and Center of Excellence operating models.
• Experience with AI capabilities in the Salesforce ecosystem — Einstein, Agent force, or Data Cloud.
• Experience with large-scale data migration, org consolidation, or merger integration programs.
• Familiarity with cloud-native architecture patterns and integration with non-Salesforce platforms.
• Experience managing Salesforce license optimization and vendor relationships.
• Contributions to the Salesforce community — Trailblazer Community leadership, user groups, Dreamforce or conference speaking, or open-source contribution.
• Preferred Certifications
• Salesforce Certified Technical Architect (CTA).
• Salesforce Certified Application Architect.
• Salesforce Certified System Architect.
• Salesforce Certified Platform Developer II.
• Salesforce Certified Integration Architect or Data Architect.

• Health Benefits
• Referral Program
• Excellent growth and advancement opportunities