Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Salesforce Technical Architect

🎯 Role Definition

The Salesforce Technical Architect is a senior technical leader responsible for designing, governing, and delivering enterprise-grade Salesforce solutions that align with business strategy, technical standards, and long-term platform scalability. This role owns solution architecture for Salesforce clouds and integrations, sets best practices for data and security, guides development teams on Apex/Lightning/Flow implementations, and partners with product, infrastructure, and security stakeholders to ensure reliable, performant, and maintainable CRM solutions.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior Salesforce Developer / Lead Developer
Salesforce Solution Architect or Integration Lead
CRM/Platform Technical Lead (Salesforce)

Advancement To:

Enterprise Architect / Chief Architect
Head of CRM / VP of Product Technology
Director of Cloud Architecture or CTO

Lateral Moves:

Salesforce Delivery Lead / Program Architect
Integration Architect (MuleSoft / API-led)
Platform Engineering Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Lead end-to-end solution architecture for Salesforce implementations across Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, CPQ, Marketing Cloud, Experience Cloud, and related products, ensuring alignment to enterprise roadmaps, compliance, and ROI objectives.
Translate complex business requirements into a coherent Salesforce technical architecture, including data model, security model, integration patterns, and deployment strategy that balance short-term delivery with long-term scalability.
Define and enforce architecture standards, design patterns, coding conventions, and governance processes for Apex, Lightning Web Components (LWC), Visualforce (where applicable), Flows, and declarative automation to ensure maintainable, testable, and upgrade-safe solutions.
Architect and review integrations between Salesforce and external systems (ERP, data warehouses, custom applications) using API-led approaches (REST, SOAP), middleware such as MuleSoft, Dell Boomi, or Informatica, and event-driven patterns where appropriate.
Design and validate data migration strategies and ETL/ELT processes for complex CRM data transformations, deduplication, and historical reconciliation to ensure data integrity during cutovers and synchronizations.
Provide technical leadership and hands-on guidance to development teams during sprint execution, code reviews, performance tuning, and root-cause analysis for production issues, ensuring on-time delivery with high quality.
Drive solution sizing, performance benchmarking, and capacity planning for Salesforce orgs and integrations to meet SLAs, minimize latency, and optimize API usage and platform limits.
Establish and maintain security and compliance architecture for Salesforce deployments, including field-level security, sharing rules, SSO/SAML, OAuth flows, Shield encryption, and adherence to GDPR, HIPAA, or other regulatory requirements.
Create and present architecture artifacts: solution diagrams, sequence flows, data models, non-functional requirements, deployment pipelines, and risk registers to business and C-suite stakeholders for approval and funding.
Lead technical discovery workshops, gap analyses, and feasibility studies to identify constraints, technical debt, and migration risks and define mitigation plans and incremental delivery approaches.
Design CI/CD and DevOps practices for Salesforce, including source-driven development, scratch orgs or sandboxes strategy, automated test suites, static analysis, and deployment automation via tools such as Salesforce DX, Jenkins, Copado, Gearset, or Azure DevOps.
Manage multi-org or multi-cloud architecture considerations, including integration patterns for global rollouts, managed package strategies, namespace management, and cross-org data consolidation or GTM strategies.
Evaluate and recommend Salesforce-native and third-party products (managed packages, AppExchange solutions) and provide proof-of-concept guidance to accelerate delivery while mitigating vendor lock-in and security risks.
Define org architecture for Experience Cloud / Community portals, including content model, authentication, guest user access, and integration with backend services and commerce systems.
Own non-functional requirements such as scalability, observability, monitoring, disaster recovery, and incident response planning for Salesforce-based solutions.
Partner with product owners, business analysts, and stakeholders to prioritize architecture-driven backlog items, technical debt remediation, and platform enablement initiatives.
Mentor and upskill internal teams on Salesforce architecture best practices, design decisions, and operational excellence through workshops, brown-bags, and documented playbooks.
Conduct architecture reviews and gate approvals for major releases to ensure alignment with strategic architecture principles and to reduce rework and post-production defects.
Drive cost optimization and licensing strategy for Salesforce investments, recommending governance around environments, sandboxes, data storage, and API usage.
Facilitate cross-functional alignment between infrastructure, security, data, and integration teams to ensure cohesive platform adoption and consistent operational processes across cloud services.
Lead troubleshooting and incident management for complex production issues, coordinate root-cause analysis, and implement corrective measures to prevent recurrence.
Maintain awareness of Salesforce roadmap, new product releases, and emerging technologies (MuleSoft, Tableau/CRM Analytics, Einstein/AI) to advise on upgrades and innovation opportunities.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
Provide technical input into RFP/RFI responses for Salesforce-related procurements.
Assist in vendor selection and manage architecture-related vendor relationships.
Contribute to documentation standards, runbooks, and architecture decision records (ADRs).
Represent the platform team in steering committees and governance boards.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Expert knowledge of Salesforce platform architecture across Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, CPQ, Experience Cloud, and Marketing Cloud.
Strong hands-on experience with Apex, Lightning Web Components (LWC), Visualforce, Salesforce Flows, and declarative automation best practices.
Proven expertise in integration patterns and middleware: REST/SOAP APIs, MuleSoft, Dell Boomi, Informatica, Kafka, or custom API layers.
Deep understanding of data modelling in Salesforce, including custom objects, polymorphic lookups, large data volume (LDV) strategies, and data migration tools (Data Loader, Talend, Informatica).
Experience designing and implementing CI/CD pipelines for Salesforce using Salesforce DX, Git, Jenkins, Copado, Gearset, or Azure DevOps.
Security and compliance experience: SSO/SAML, OAuth, Shield Platform Encryption, field-level encryption, and RBAC/sharing model design.
Performance tuning and platform limit management, including asynchronous processing (Batch Apex, Queueable, Platform Events) and governor limits mitigation strategies.
Experience with managed packages, packaging strategies (unlocked packages, 2GP), and multi-org or ISV architecture considerations.
Familiarity with analytics and AI on Salesforce: CRM Analytics (Tableau), Einstein, and reporting best practices to support data-driven decisions.
Strong knowledge of enterprise architecture frameworks, RESTful API design, message queues, event-driven architecture, and microservices integration.
Proficiency with debugging, logging, New Relic/Sentry/Splunk-type monitoring, and incident/postmortem processes for cloud applications.
Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, Heroku) and how they complement Salesforce integrations and event processing.

Soft Skills

Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills; able to translate technical trade-offs to non-technical executives and business owners.
Strategic thinking with the ability to balance immediate delivery needs and long-term platform health and scalability.
Strong leadership and mentoring skills to grow developer capabilities and enforce architecture governance.
Problem-solving mindset with demonstrated experience in rapid root-cause analysis and pragmatic remediation.
Collaborative approach, able to work across product, security, data, and infrastructure teams to align on platform strategy.
Prioritization and decision-making skills in high-pressure, ambiguous environments.
Detail-oriented with an emphasis on documentation, repeatable processes, and auditability.
Change management and influencing skills to drive adoption of architecture standards and best practices.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or related technical field (or equivalent professional experience).

Preferred Education:

Master’s degree in Computer Science, MBA with technical focus, or advanced certifications in cloud/enterprise architecture.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science / Software Engineering
Information Systems / Business Information Technology
Enterprise Architecture / Cloud Computing

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

8+ years in Salesforce development and architecture roles with at least 3–5 years in a Technical Architect, Solutions Architect or equivalent leadership capacity.

Preferred:

10+ years of enterprise CRM experience, multiple full-lifecycle Salesforce implementations, demonstrable experience delivering complex multi-cloud integrations, and advanced Salesforce certifications (Salesforce Certified Technical Architect (CTA) or Domain Architect certifications, Certified Application Architect + System Architect, or equivalent).