Lead Engineer, Systems Engineering

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Job Details

Lead Engineer - Platform

Job Summary:

The Salesforce Platform Lead will serve as the technical owner and strategic driver of Cencora's Salesforce platform with a primary focus on enterprise release management, platform health maintenance, and long-term platform modernization. This role is responsible for establishing and continuously maturing the processes, tooling, governance, and engineering standards that ensure Salesforce releases are delivered safely, reliably, and at scale across a complex multi-team, multi-cloud Salesforce environment. The Salesforce Platform Lead will lead platform lifecycle planning - including org health assessments, technical debt remediation, legacy modernization initiatives, and proactive adoption of Salesforce's evolving platform capabilities. Acting as the central authority on platform stability and evolution, this leader partners with development teams, IT operations, security, and senior business stakeholders to keep the Salesforce platform performant, compliant, secure, and future-ready. The ideal candidate is a seasoned Salesforce professional with deep expertise in release engineering, DevOps practices, platform governance, and a proven track record of leading large-scale Salesforce modernization programs.

What You'll Do:

Salesforce Release Analysis & enablement

• Lead the Release process for Salesforce changes, ensuring all releases are properly reviewed, approved, risk-assessed, and communicated to stakeholders.
• Manage Salesforce tri-annual release readiness - coordinating impact assessments, sandbox preview testing, feature evaluation, stakeholder communications, and production readiness sign-offs for every Salesforce seasonal release (Spring, Summer, Winter).
• Define quality gates and automated testing requirements (Apex unit tests, Jest, Provar, static code analysis) that must be satisfied prior to any production deployment.

Platform Maintenance & Operational Excellence

• Own Salesforce org health across all environments - continuously monitoring platform performance, governor limit consumption, storage utilization, API usage, and system stability.
• Lead platform health assessments and technical audits, identifying risks related to technical debt, deprecated features, security vulnerabilities, and configuration drift.
• Manage sandbox strategy and environment lifecycle including sandbox provisioning, refresh scheduling, data masking, and environment-specific configuration management.
• Oversee Salesforce license management and org optimization - tracking user license utilization, feature license consumption, storage management, and cost optimization opportunities.
• Establish and maintain platform monitoring and alerting frameworks using Salesforce Shield Event Monitoring, Health Check, Optimizer, and third-party observability tools.
• Drive incident management and root cause analysis (RCA) for platform outages, deployment failures, and critical production defects - implementing preventive measures to reduce recurrence.
• Govern data management practices within the platform including data archival strategies, duplicate management, large data volume (LDV) handling, and data quality frameworks.
• Ensure security and compliance maintenance including regular reviews of profiles, permission sets, sharing rules, connected apps, and org-wide security settings in alignment with HIPAA, SOX, and Cencora IT security standards.
• Manage Salesforce Trust site monitoring and communication of planned maintenance windows and unplanned outages to internal stakeholders.
• Coordinate third-party ISV and AppExchange app management including version upgrades, compatibility testing, license renewals, and vendor relationship oversight.

Platform Modernization

• Define and execute a multi-year Salesforce platform modernization roadmap, prioritizing migration from legacy configurations, deprecated technologies, and outdated customizations to modern Salesforce platform paradigms.
• Lead the migration from Classic to Lightning Experience, Aura to Lightning Web Components (LWC), and legacy Process Builder/Workflow Rules to Salesforce Flow - ensuring systematic, low-risk modernization at scale.
• Drive adoption of Salesforce DX (source-driven development), unlocked packages, and 2nd Generation Packaging (2GP) to modernize the development and deployment model.
• Evaluate and implement Salesforce AI and Einstein capabilities (e.g., Einstein Copilot, Predictive AI, Agentforce) as part of the platform modernization strategy.
• Champion the transition to modular, package-based architecture to improve deployment independence, reduce org complexity, and enable team scalability.
• Partner with enterprise architecture and IT leadership to align Salesforce modernization initiatives with broader digital transformation and technology strategy.
• Build and maintain a platform modernization backlog, tracking technical debt remediation items, deprecated feature migrations, and innovation initiatives with clear prioritization and business value articulation.
• Drive developer experience modernization - improving tooling, local development environments, code quality standards, and developer productivity frameworks across the Salesforce engineering teams.

Team Leadership & Enablement

• Lead, mentor, and develop a cross-functional team of Salesforce Senior Developers, Release Engineers, and Administrators across multiple functional domains (Sales, DevOps, Experience Cloud, Data Cloud, Sales Cycle).
• Establish team-wide engineering standards, coding guidelines, peer review processes, and knowledge-sharing practices.
• Foster a culture of operational excellence, continuous improvement, and innovation within the Salesforce platform team.
• Drive Salesforce release training and enablement programs to upskill development teams on new platform capabilities, release readiness, and modernization technologies.

Stakeholder & Vendor Engagement

• Serve as the primary escalation point and technical spokesperson for all Salesforce platform release, maintenance, and modernization matters with IT leadership, business stakeholders, and executive sponsors.
• Manage the Salesforce vendor relationship - liaising with Salesforce Account Executives, Technical Account Managers (TAM), and Premier Support teams to maximize platform value and resolve critical issues.
• Lead platform roadmap reviews and steering committee presentations, articulating modernization progress, platform health status, and strategic recommendations.
• Collaborate with security, compliance, and risk teams to ensure platform changes meet enterprise governance and regulatory requirements.

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience).
• Working knowledge of Salesforce administration, configuration, customization, and declarative platform capabilities.
• 8+ years of Salesforce platform experience, including at least 3+ years in a platform lead, Salesforce release management, or architect role.
• Deep expertise in Salesforce release management including CI/CD pipeline ownership, deployment tooling (Copado, SFDX, GitHub Actions), and change management governance.
• Strong hands-on knowledge of Salesforce DevOps practices: source control, branching strategies, automated testing, environment management, and deployment automation.
• Proven experience with Salesforce org health management: Health Check, Optimizer, Event Monitoring, governor limits, and performance tuning.
• Solid understanding of Salesforce platform architecture: multi-org design, metadata management, data architecture, integration patterns, and security model.
• Experience leading Salesforce modernization initiatives such as Classic-to-Lightning migration, Flow migration, or LWC adoption.
• Familiarity with Salesforce tri-annual release management including sandbox preview testing, impact assessment, and production readiness processes.
• Strong stakeholder management, communication, and executive reporting skills.
• Active Salesforce Certified Platform Developer I and at least one advanced or architect-level Salesforce certification.
• Experience with Agile/Scrum or SAFe delivery frameworks at a program or portfolio level.
• Lead Data Cloud adoption and integration into the broader Salesforce platform, enabling unified customer profiles and data-driven personalization across clouds.
• Platform Dveloper - II certification

Preferred Qualifications:

• Application Architect certification
• Assess and modernize integration architecture - migrating legacy point-to-point integrations to scalable, event-driven patterns using Platform Events, Change Data Capture (CDC), and middleware platforms (e.g., MuleSoft

.

Master's degree in computer science, software engineering, computer engineering, information systems, or a related field, or equivalent experience preferred.

6+ years of experience in software engineering, systems engineering, application development, platform engineering, or a related field required.

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02), AZ-900: Azure Fundamentals, RHCSA (Red Hat Certified System Administrator) certification, or equivalent preferred.

Knowledge of advanced software and systems engineering principles, development lifecycle practices, testing strategies, and production support models.

Knowledge of application architecture, system design, integration patterns, cloud and infrastructure components, and secure engineering practices.

Knowledge of performance engineering, scalability, reliability, resilience, observability, and operational support frameworks.

Skill in technical design, coding or configuration, debugging, root cause analysis, performance tuning, and structured problem solving.

Skill in using development frameworks, testing tools, source control platforms, CI/CD pipelines, observability tools, collaboration platforms, and work management systems.

Ability to lead complex engineering work independently while applying strong technical judgment, quality standards, and risk awareness.

Ability to influence technical direction, guide design decisions, and collaborate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Ability to mentor less experienced engineers and drive adoption of engineering best practices, documentation standards, and continuous improvement methods.

What Cencora offers

Benefit offerings outside the US may vary by country and will be aligned to local market practice. The eligibility and effective date may differ for some benefits and for team members covered under collective bargaining agreements.

Affiliated Companies

Equal Employment Opportunity

Cencora is committed to providing equal employment opportunity without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, national origin, age, disability, veteran status or membership in any other class protected by federal, state or local law.

The company’s continued success depends on the full and effective utilization of qualified individuals. Therefore, harassment is prohibited and all matters related to recruiting, training, compensation, benefits, promotions and transfers comply with equal opportunity principles and are non-discriminatory.

Cencora is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities during the employment process which are consistent with legal requirements. If you wish to request an accommodation while seeking employment, please call 888.692.2272 or email [email protected]. We will make accommodation determinations on a request-by-request basis. Messages and emails regarding anything other than accommodations requests will not be returned