Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) - Public Sector, Nonprofit & Education

About the role

Production experience required. Builder mindset non-negotiable. Forward Deployed Engineers design, build, and deploy agentic AI solutions directly inside enterprise customer environments. You'll work as part of a delivery team, partnering closely with a Deployment Strategist to co-build solutions that go live in production environments from day one.

Responsibilities

• Develop AI agents and experiences that take real actions for real organizations.
• Design agent intelligence: prompts, reasoning, tool calls, and integration with customer systems, leveraging our Agentic AI platform and current LLM techniques.
• Own technical components end-to-end: from architecture choice to deployed, validated, and observable in production.
• Build and integrate data pipelines on Salesforce Data 360, Snowflake, Databricks, and customer data platforms. Model the data, ship the pipeline, validate the output.
• Build and maintain agent performance dashboards and customer KPI reporting to track deployment health and business outcomes.
• Contribute to proofs-of-concept and MVPs that move from sketch to deployable in days, not months.
• Surface platform gaps, edge cases, and field insights to senior Engineers and the product team.
• Partner with the Deployment Strategist in your pod to translate customer business challenges into agentic solutions that actually ship.

Requirements

• A degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• 3+ years (6-10 years for Senior levels) of software engineering or technical delivery experience, with at least one production system you'd be proud to walk us through - ideally in an AI tech stack, full-stack development, or working with frontier models.
• Prior customer-facing technical delivery experience (consulting, professional services, or forward deployed engineering).
• Proven experience managing and delivering customer-facing projects within Public Sector, Higher Education, or Nonprofit environments.
• Familiarity with at least one of Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, or Apex.
• Experience with LLMs and prompt engineering.
• Deep understanding of data modeling, APIs, and integration patterns.
• Ability to hold your own in a room with sales teams and customer architects.
• Experience with cloud data platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery).
• Experience across specialist AI delivery areas: data engineering, platform architecture, or headless deployments.

Qualifications

• Fluent in at least one of Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, or Apex.
• Willingness to experiment with emerging AI tools, models, and frameworks.
• Curiosity about the evolving AI/data landscape.
• Ability to thrive in a collaborative environment.
• Comfort with occasional travel (~25% of the time).

Skills

• Agentic AI development and deployment.
• Data modeling and pipeline management.
• Customer-facing project management.
• LLM and prompt engineering.
• Cloud data platform expertise.
• Collaboration and teamwork.
• Travel readiness.

Benefits

At Salesforce, we offer a comprehensive benefits package to support your well-being and financial security. This includes:

• Time off programs
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Mental health support
• Paid parental leave
• Life and disability insurance
• 401(k)
• Employee stock purchasing program

For more details, visit Salesforce Benefits.

Pay

The typical base salary range for this position is $88,970 - $287,910 annually. Specific ranges apply to specific work locations in California, New York, and select cities in the metropolitan areas of Boston, Chicago, Seattle, and Washington DC.

Schedule

Occasional travel (~25% of the time) is required to work directly alongside customers.