Director, Salesforce Technical Platform

About the role

Lead the operational strategy and day-to-day execution for the Salesforce platform to ensure reliability, performance, security, and scalable delivery of business value. This role partners across IT and business leadership to mature platform governance, drive continuous improvement, manage vendor/partner performance, and lead a cross-functional team supporting Salesforce products and services.

Primary Duties And Responsibilities

• Defines and executes the Salesforce Platform Operations strategy, aligning to enterprise IT strategy, architecture direction, and business priorities.
• Partners with product owners, delivery leads, capacity planners, and business stakeholders to forecast demand, plan releases, and ensure operational readiness.
• Establishes and maintains strong liaison relationships with business and IT partners to deliver effective, sustainable platform solutions.
• Led continuous improvement across operational processes (incident, problem, change, release, environments, DevOps, monitoring, and service management).
• Develops business-focused concepts and recommendations, including risk, cost-benefit, roadmap impacts, technical debt prioritization, and defect/enhancement triage.
• Fosters an environment of Design Thinking and operational excellence (automation-first mindset, standardization, resiliency engineering).
• Develops and maintains platform roadmaps (operational maturity, tooling, monitoring, secure configuration, performance optimization) and plans for end-of-life/retirement of assets and capabilities.
• Interfaces with customers/stakeholders regarding service offerings, operating model, value proposition, and onboarding processes.
• Develops a customer communications strategy to promote awareness of platform events (maintenance, major releases, incidents, and capability launches).
• Benchmarks and manages IT metrics for the Salesforce platform and operations organization.
• Defines and directs interactions with governance, audit, compliance, security, and quality teams.
• Removes technical and functional roadblocks across teams, coordinating with architecture, engineering, shared services, and other platform/product teams to resolve dependencies.

Platform Definition / Risk Management

• Defines operational attributes and standards for the Salesforce platform including availability, performance, scalability, security, compliance, and recoverability.
• Oversees the development and adoption of governance across environments, org strategy, identity/access, data retention, integrations, and release management.
• Prioritizes and directs continuous improvement initiatives including technical debt reduction, hardening, reliability enhancements, and defect resolution.
• Oversees the development of operational metrics aligned to business outcomes and KPIs (e.g., uptime, incident trends, change success rate, lead time, user experience measures).
• Oversees development and negotiation of SLAs/OLAs for Salesforce services and dependent service teams.
• Affords risk assessment across the platform lifecycle; recommends and directs mitigation plans (security vulnerabilities, performance constraints, release risks, vendor risks, resiliency gaps).
• Defines and directs interactions with governance, audit, compliance, security, and quality teams.
• Removes technical and functional roadblocks across teams, coordinating with architecture, engineering, shared services, and other platform/product teams to resolve dependencies.

Service Cost / Financial Management

• Manages the cost to run the Salesforce platform including licenses, managed services, tools, environments, and platform-related services.
• Identifies cost optimization opportunities and drives efficient consumption (license governance, environment strategy, automation, tooling rationalization).
• Performs profit & loss / chargeback analysis where applicable.
• Negotiates cost allocation for shared services and enterprise capabilities tied to Salesforce operations.
• Ensures cost effectiveness while maintaining appropriate service levels and risk posture.

Procurement Planning

• Identifies/approves procurement needs for new operational capabilities (monitoring, automation, security tools, sandbox strategy, CI/CD, backup/restore).
• Documents improvement plans based on current deployment, performance, and operational maturity gaps.

Platform Performance, Reliability, and Support

• Establishes and drives platform operational excellence across:
  • Incident, Problem, and Change Management
  • Release/Deployment operational readiness
  • Environment management and capacity planning
  • Monitoring/alerting and observability
  • Business continuity, backup/restore, and disaster recovery (as applicable)
• Serves as a primary escalation point for high severity issues; coordinates recovery and resolution and ensures timely root cause analysis and follow-up actions.

Vendor / Partner Management

• In coordination with the Vendor Management Office (VMO), manages vendor and partner performance to ensure outcomes align to expectations.
• Provides input into contract development, renewals, and SOW governance.
• Reviews service provider performance; escalates issues and drives remediation plans for underperformance.
• Oversees contractor work and performance, including onboarding, delivery quality, and compliance with operational standards.

People / Team Leadership

• Responsible for people leadership and/or matrix leadership of cross-functional team members supporting Salesforce platform operations (admins, engineers, release managers, DevOps, support leads).
• In collaboration with Centers of Competence, manages goals, skills development, training, and workforce planning.
• Participates in Agile / SAFe ways of working to reduce risk and coordinate interdependencies with other product trains.
• Counsels and mentors team members; models strong communication, conflict resolution, and a sense of urgency.
• Might directly contribute when needed (e.g., operational playbooks, acceptance criteria, governance standards, escalation support).

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Business, or related field, or equivalent work experience.
• Typically 10+ years in IT with progressive responsibility; 5+ years in leadership roles preferred.
• Demonstrated experience operating and scaling enterprise SaaS platforms, with significant experience in Salesforce (Sales/Service/Experience Cloud, Platform, integrations).
• Experience with service management practices (ITIL-aligned), operational governance, and cross-functional delivery.
• Certification in IT service management, cloud infrastructure, or a related field preferred.

What Cencora offers

We provide compensation, benefits, and resources that enable a highly inclusive culture and support our team members’ ability to live with purpose every day. In addition to traditional offerings like medical, dental, and vision care, we also provide a comprehensive suite of benefits that focus on the physical, emotional, financial, and social aspects of wellness. This encompasses support for working families, which may include backup dependent care, adoption assistance, infertility coverage, family building support, behavioral health solutions, paid parental leave, and paid caregiver leave. To encourage your personal growth, we also offer a variety of training programs, professional development resources, and opportunities to participate in mentorship programs, employee resource groups, volunteer activities, and much more. For details, visit https://www.virtualfairhub.com/cencora.

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.

Associated Companies

Affiliated Companies: AmerisourceBergen Services Corporation