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.
- Excitement to travel approximately 25% of the time, working directly alongside customers.
Skills
- Agentic AI platform experience or certifications (Administrator, Platform Developer I, Agentforce Specialist).
- Familiarity with agent frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex) and orchestration patterns.
- Experience with cloud data platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery).
- Experience across specialist AI delivery areas: data engineering, platform architecture, or headless deployments.
Benefits
At Salesforce, we offer a variety of benefits to help you live well including: time off programs, medical, dental, vision, mental health support, paid parental leave, life and disability insurance, 401(k), and an employee stock purchasing program. More details about company benefits can be found at the following link: https://www.salesforcebenefits.com.
Pay
The typical base salary range for this position is $88,970 - $287,910 annually. Specific ranges apply to specific work locations. In California and New York, and select cities in the metropolitan areas of Boston, Chicago, Seattle, and Washington DC, the base pay range for this role in those locations is $97,860 - $316,750 per year.
Schedule
Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for the job location during the hiring process.