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 Salesforce is 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. Agentforce is the future of AI, and this role is part of the future of Salesforce.
Salesforce is seeking a highly accomplished and results-driven Engineering Program Director to architect and lead enterprise-scale portfolio governance and execution across its Product Engineering organization. The role drives execution strategy, operational excellence, and organizational alignment for complex, cross-functional programs that deliver measurable business impact — both as a hands-on expert leading Salesforce's most critical programs, and as a close partner to executives and key company stakeholders driving critical programs and activities across the company.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
- Strategic Program Leadership: Architect and drive the full operating framework for a portfolio of complex programs, ensuring alignment with Salesforce's strategic priorities and demonstrating significant business impact.
- Portfolio Management & Execution: Directly lead and manage a portfolio of high-visibility programs from concept through deployment. Define program scope, facilitate critical analyses, develop comprehensive business cases, charters, and fit-for-purpose execution plans.
- Operational Excellence & Process Ownership: Champion and institutionalize best-in-class delivery practices across development teams. Drive continuous improvement by owning and optimizing processes, tools, and communication channels, leveraging metrics, and leading regular, high-impact retrospectives.
- Executive Alignment and Communication: Partner strategically with executive and senior leadership across Engineering, Product, and Business teams to align roadmaps, prioritize initiatives, negotiate technical trade-offs, and facilitate critical decision-making. Present crisp, regular updates on program health, risk assessment, and dependency management to executive steering committees.
- Risk and Dependency Management: Proactively identify, analyze, and mitigate complex cross-program risks and dependencies that span multiple teams and organizations, ensuring clear communication of impact and proposed resolution paths to all stakeholders.
- Performance Tracking: Define, track, and communicate key Program KPIs and Portfolio Objectives and Key Results, providing transparent reporting that measures progress against strategic business outcomes.
- Cross-Organizational Influence: Cultivate deep, positive, and influential relationships with senior business leaders and technical teams across organizational boundaries, effectively prioritizing, unblocking, and removing systemic cross-team impediments at scale.
You're Our Person If
- 10+ years of progressive experience in Technical Program Management within a large-scale, enterprise software environment, demonstrating a proven ability to lead and deliver multi-year, strategic programs across multiple organizational boundaries.
- Deep understanding of modern software architecture, cloud platforms (ideally the Salesforce Platform), and the technical complexities inherent in a global, highly available system. Solid background in enterprise software development cycle.
- Demonstrated strong technical and business vision, with the ability to translate complex strategic objectives into clear, executable program plans.
- Proven track record of successfully implementing, scaling, and optimizing development processes utilizing various agile methodologies (Scrum) at an organizational level.
- Exceptional communication, negotiation, and stakeholder management skills, with proven ability to influence technical and non-technical senior leaders (VP/SVP/EVP level) without formal authority.
- A related technical degree is required.
Question
Tell me about yourself.
Opening Statement (~45–90 sec)
Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. I'm a Technical Program Management leader with 18+ years of experience architecting enterprise-scale portfolio governance for global technology organizations — most directly at Capital One and Amazon/AWS, the two experiences most relevant to this role. At Capital One, I'm currently a Senior Director, Engineering Programs where I lead technical program governance for enterprise cloud and cybersecurity transformation — multi-year roadmaps and OKR frameworks that governed the migration of 1,800+ applications to AWS at 99.9% operational resilience, and I founded and scale the enterprise TPM Center of Excellence. Before that, I spent four years as a Principal Technical Program Manager at Amazon/AWS, where I led the end-to-end delivery of 3 new AWS Regions and Availability Zones from architecture design through global availability, and drove technical delivery for Prime Video and Freevee, generating $20M+ in monthly incremental revenue at 99.99% availability for 120M+ global users. What ties both of those together — and what I'd bring to this Engineering Program Director role — is the same operating pattern: build the governance framework, align executives without formal authority, and unblock cross-program dependencies systemically rather than one escalation at a time.
Detailed Response
Portfolio Governance & TPM Center of Excellence (Capital One)
As Senior Director, Engineering Programs / Technical Program Management at Capital One since September 2024, I lead the overarching technical program governance for enterprise cloud and cybersecurity transformation — establishing strategic multi-year roadmaps and OKR frameworks that governed the migration of 1,800+ applications to AWS while sustaining 99.9% operational resilience across all product engineering portfolios. I founded and scaled the enterprise TPM Center of Excellence, institutionalizing best-in-class delivery frameworks, standardized milestones, execution rigor, and KPI/OKR tracking across cross-functional engineering teams — and I direct, mentor, and grow a high-performing organization of Technical Program Managers.
Global Scale & Executive Alignment (Amazon/AWS)
At Amazon Services Inc. / AWS, as Principal Technical Program Manager for four years, I headed multi-disciplinary engineering initiatives spanning infrastructure, network engineering, and platform software to deploy 3 new AWS Regions and Availability Zones from initial architecture design through global general availability. I also drove end-to-end technical delivery for high-visibility, mission-critical OTT and AdTech platforms — Prime Video and Freevee — generating $20M+ in monthly incremental revenue while maintaining 99.99% service availability for 120M+ global users, and partnered closely with VP/SVP stakeholders across Product, Engineering, and Business Development to architect unified publisher onboarding infrastructure that cut integration lead time by 80%.
Platform & Agentic AI Delivery
At Capital One, I also championed an enterprise Kubernetes-as-a-Service / Internal Developer Platform operating model spanning 300+ production clusters, cutting deployment cycle times by 99% (from 6 weeks to under 45 minutes) and infrastructure costs by 30% — and spearheaded the integration of Agentforce-style agentic AI architectures, RAG pipelines, and LLM-powered automation into developer workflows, which is directly relevant to how Salesforce is building the agentic enterprise through Agentforce.
Foundation
I hold an M.S. in Information Systems from George Mason University, along with AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, AWS Certified Generative AI Developer – Professional, PMP, and CSM certifications, plus Anthropic's Claude, AI Fluency, and Model Context Protocol certifications — an intentional investment in the AI-native skill set this role needs.
Closing Statement
So what I'd bring to this Engineering Program Director seat is a track record of building the exact governance model this role calls for — portfolio governance, executive alignment without formal authority, and systemic risk unblocking — proven at Capital One and Amazon scale, and I'd want to bring that same operating discipline to Salesforce's Product Engineering portfolio.