Salesforce Now Hiring for Well-Architected: What You Need to Know

Salesforce has now begun hiring for what appears to be its rebooted Well-Architected team – the core team behind the Well-Architected program that is dedicated to upholding high Salesforce architecture standards. 

This comes after Salesforce announced it would be relaunching the program at this year’s flagship conference, Dreamforce. 

What Is Happening to the Program?

In July, Salesforce confirmed that its beloved Well-Architected program would be returning this year – a welcome announcement since Salesforce Ben confirmed in February that the program did not exist anymore “in its current capacity”. 

Although this news didn’t come as much of a shock for many members of the community, it solidified the idea for them that Salesforce had closed the door on one of the most important teams and frameworks that the ecosystem had. This is the same reason that, although the relaunch announcement was met with a lot of excitement, it was also met with skepticism, especially as the program had originally just faded into obscurity without much of a word.

What Positions Are Available?

At the time of writing, on the official Salesforce job website, there are 11 jobs matching the “Well-Architected” keyword. However, according to their descriptions, it appears that Salesforce is currently only hiring for four positions within the actual Well-Architected team at present.

These positions are:

• Senior Director, Well-Architected Evangelism 
• Lead Architect Evangelist 
• Principal Architect Evangelist (x2)

It is evident that this is likely Salesforce’s way of filling the lead roles of the team, looking for a new Senior Director and architectural faces of the team. The Senior Director position is based in Illinois, Chicago, the Lead Architect Evangelist position is based in Washington, Seattle, and the two Principal Architect Evangelist positions are based in Illinois, Chicago, and Washington, Seattle, respectively.

A New Team? Why Now?

Although it is positive to see that Salesforce is putting in the effort to create a well-rounded new team, it does pose the question: Why now? Also, why an entirely new team? 

As Salesforce did not make a formal announcement of the program’s termination, the only inferred information that the community received for a while came from former Well-Architected team members announcing their departure on sites like LinkedIn. 

One of the most notable members to do so was Zayne Turner, the former Senior Director of Well-Architected & Salesforce Architects, who took to LinkedIn to write:  

“Today is my last day at Salesforce. It’s a bittersweet milestone. It’s tough to be leaving, while feeling like we just got started.”

“When the team shared impact metrics, we talked in terms of active users, hours of engagement, various quality indicators – and we had great numbers. Our tools and resources reached hundreds of thousands of monthly active users.” 

“Thank you especially to the team that was the engine behind Well-Architected and Salesforce Architects.”

Zayne’s departure came as a particular shock due to her years of experience and dedication to Salesforce, and other team members began coming forward with their own words, too.

It was initially alluded to that costs and budgets were a factor at play, so it can be inferred that they likely had a considerable impact on the restructuring of the team and the latest hiring decisions. 

There is no indication that former Well-Architected team members cannot try for roles again, but given the nature of the team’s and program’s disbandment, it would not be surprising to see them hesitant to pick up where they left off.

While it is not yet clear which wider umbrella the new Well-Architected team will fall under, what part of Salesforce the new group reports to could have a big impact on how it goes about its work. A natural team would be the Developer Relations team. Nothing is confirmed here; Salesforce CTO Parker Harris signaled that Salesforce President and Chief Engineering Officer Srini Tallapragada would be looking into how to address the concerns about the Well-Architected program at this year’s True To The Core breakout session at TrailblazerDX. 

Summary

Salesforce has openly acknowledged that the way it handled the Well-Architected program was wrong, and that it is going to make much more of an effort to take on community feedback, utilize open lines of communication, and move forward in a way that has the ecosystem’s interests at heart. 

However, it is likely that the community will still be skeptical for some time, especially as Salesforce builds the new architecture team. We will likely see the beginnings of the new team at this year’s Dreamforce, and we will be reporting on that live from the ground. 

Have plans to apply for the new Well-Architected team? Chat to us anonymously or not about your experience at tips@salesforceben.com

The post Salesforce Now Hiring for Well-Architected: What You Need to Know appeared first on Salesforce Ben.