Salesforce Administrator; Kindsight Ascend CEMI

Position: Salesforce Administrator (Kindsight Ascend) - (CEMI)
Working Title:

Salesforce Administrator (Kindsight Ascend) - (CEMI) [Remote] [3 Year Term]

No Visa Sponsorship is available for this position.

This is a 3 year term appointment which may be ended or extended based on organizational needs, funding availability, and performance.

About the Cornell Experience Modernization Initiative and Donor Engagement and Experience Project

The Cornell Experience Modernization Initiative (CEMI) is a multi-year program designed to improve the experience of students, faculty, staff, alumni, donors, patients, and partners by unifying and enhancing administrative systems and processes across all Cornell University locations. Its name CEMI is said as "See Me" because the focus is on you: the people who use Cornell's systems and data to accomplish your goals.

CEMI Donor Engagement and Experience Project (DEEP) is a major, multi-year effort to modernize and unify development and engagement technology across Cornell's Ithaca and Cornell Tech campuses, Weill Cornell Medicine (WCM), and the Lab of Ornithology.

What will you do:

The Salesforce Administrator (Kindsight Ascend) plays a key role within the Cornell Enterprise Modernization Initiative (CEMI), with primary responsibility for supporting the Donor Engagement and Experience Project (DEEP)-a major, multi‑year initiative to modernize and unify development and engagement technology across Cornell's Ithaca and Cornell Tech campuses, Weill Cornell Medicine (WCM), and the Lab of Ornithology.

The CEMI DEEP Salesforce Administrator supports Kindsight Ascend and its associated data model as part of a large scale, multicampus transformation that consolidates development and engagement capabilities on a single Salesforce platform. The CEMI DEEP Salesforce Administrator is responsible for end-to-end support and maintenance of Salesforce platform solutions, including Kindsight Ascend, other managed packages, configurations, and custom-built capabilities, to meet the institution's evolving fundraising and donor engagement goals.

The CEMI DEEP Salesforce Administrator works closely with fundraising, engagement, and operations teams across all campuses, as well as Salesforce Operations, the DEEP project team, campus stakeholders, and the system integrator responsible for Kindsight Ascend implementation, to ensure the platform is stable, optimized, and effectively aligned with institutional objectives.

The CEMI DEEP Salesforce Administrator has a dual reporting relationship to Cornell Information Technologies and Development Information Technology and participates directly in industry‑level activities to maintain a strong understanding of processes, priorities, and initiatives. Working closely with business analysts and functional stakeholders, the CEMI DEEP Salesforce Administrator helps capture business requirements and translates them into platform configuration and technical specifications, and leads or supports testing, documentation, training, and user adoption efforts.

The CEMI DEEP Salesforce Administrator serves as the dedicated subject matter expert for the Salesforce ecosystem, with responsibility for ensuring the platform is optimally configured and strategically aligned with the University's fundraising and donor engagement objectives through Kindsight Ascend. In this role, they partner closely with Development Information Technology, providing expert guidance on how to effectively leverage Salesforce capabilities-including Sales, Experience, and Marketing Cloud-to drive operational efficiency, enhance donor engagement, and directly support the University's philanthropic mission.

The CEMI DEEP Salesforce Administrator is responsible for the end-to-end administration, configuration, support, and continuous optimization of the Salesforce platform and Kindsight Ascend, including managed packages and related capabilities such as data unification and marketing data activation. This role ensures platform stability, data integrity, security, and compliance while aligning solutions with enterprise architecture and evolving business needs. Through ongoing collaboration with Development IT colleagues, the administrator identifies pain points, recommends best practice solutions, and implements improvements that enhance system usability, scalability, and the overall user experience.

Key Duties and Responsibilities

* Administer, configure, support, and optimize the Salesforce platform, with Kindsight Ascend as the core managed package, to support enterprise fundraising and donor engagement operations.

* Install, configure, upgrade, and maintain Salesforce managed packages and associated standard and custom data models.

* Manage Salesforce and Kindsight Ascend environments, releases, and deployments; coordinate testing, validation, and production readiness.

* Configure and maintain platform functionality across Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Experience Cloud, and related Salesforce ecosystem capabilities leveraged by Ascend.

* Implement and support declarative…