Missionforce - Senior​/Lead Forward Deployed Engineer; FDE), Public Sector

About Salesforce

Salesforce is the #1 AI CRM, where humans with agents drive customer success together. Here, ambition meets action. Tech meets trust. And innovation isn’t a buzzword – it’s a way of life. The world of work as we know it is changing and we’re looking for Trailblazers who are passionate about bettering business and the world through AI, driving innovation, and keeping Salesforce's core values at the heart of it all.

Must be a U.S. citizen (U.S. born or naturalized) living on U.S. soil who does not hold dual citizenship and agrees to complete a U.S. federal government Minimum Background Investigation (MBI) for a Moderate Public Trust position. Candidates interested in the Hawaii location must be based in Oahu. Qualification for this job is contingent upon acceptable results from a background investigation as well as maintaining the specific level of U.S. government background investigation and clearance required for this role.

Active Secret or Top Secret clearance is required.

As a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) on our Public Sector team, you will be embedded with U.S. Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, and Aerospace clients to design and deploy bespoke AI solutions that drive mission‑critical outcomes. You will also architect the backbone of a planet‑scale platform that ships hundreds of features daily with rock‑solid reliability and security. This role demands a builder’s mindset, an AI‑first approach, and the technical depth to take complex challenges from concept to production.

• Serve as the technical lead on high‑profile customer engagements – designing, building, and deploying tailored Salesforce solutions for defense, intelligence, and aerospace missions.
• Engineer distributed systems running across thousands of compute nodes on AWS, GCP, Azure, or Alibaba Cloud.
• Develop Infrastructure‑as‑Code (Terraform), microservices (Kubernetes, Docker), and data pipelines.
• Build and ship high‑quality, production‑grade software using modern engineering practices, with AI as a core part of your development workflow.
• Design and orchestrate complex systems where AI agents integrate seamlessly into human workflows, driving efficiency and innovation at scale.
• Contribute to building and maintaining the shared system context, an explicit repository of system designs, constraints, and standards that enables AI to operate accurately and reliably.
• Critically evaluate code (human or AI‑generated) for correctness, quality, security, and performance.
• Partner directly with customers and mission stakeholders to translate complex needs into technical solutions.
• Lead rapid prototyping, root cause analysis, and best‑practice evangelism across teams.
• Mentor junior engineers and serve as a technical role model.

The ideal candidate brings the following:

• 8+ years of hands‑on software engineering experience.
• Deep proficiency in Java, GoLang, Python, or Ruby.
• A demonstrated, genuine AI‑first approach to engineering – using AI to move faster, build fluency across the stack, and contribute well beyond your core specialty.
• Experience using AI tools (e.g., Claude Code, Git Hub Copilot, Codex, Cursor, etc.) in development workflows.
• Advanced prompt engineering skills and the ability to write precise, structured prompts and cultivate the system context that makes AI outputs reliable, secure, and production‑ready.
• Experience with enterprise data platforms (Salesforce Data Cloud, Snowflake, Databricks, Big Query).
• Experience working in an air‑gapped Gov Cloud environment.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills – from command centers to executive briefings.
• Ability to travel 25‑50% of the time, as needed to customer sites.
• Active Secret or Top Secret clearance required.

• Background in defense/aerospace, classified environments (IL5/IL6), or federal civilian agencies.
• Prior experience in a customer‑facing, hands‑on technical lead or architect role.
• Salesforce platform experience (Agentforce, Data Cloud, Flows, LWC, Apex).
• Familiarity with IL5/IL6/CNSS #1253 requirements or deployment to classified environments.

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