Salesforce Solutions Architect (Financial/ Banking)- Johnston, RI - Only W2

Salesforce Principal Architect
Enterprise CRM Architecture | Financial Services
Role overview
We are seeking a Salesforce Principal Architect to help shape the future of our enterprise CRM platform and the experiences it enables for customers, bankers, relationship managers, and service teams.
In this role, you will translate business strategy and complex requirements into secure, scalable, resilient, and actionable Salesforce solution designs. You will work across business, product, enterprise architecture, cybersecurity, data, risk, and engineering teams to establish architectural direction, evaluate solution options, and guide initiatives from discovery through architecture approval and engineering delivery.
You will own the quality and completeness of architectural designs, including the artifacts, decisions, and implementation guidance needed for engineering teams to build with confidence. You will navigate complex architecture review and governance processes by developing clear, evidence-based designs that demonstrate business alignment, address risk, and make technical trade-offs explicit.
This role combines deep Salesforce expertise with curiosity, experimentation, and forward-looking thinking. You will explore how generative AI, agentic AI, intelligent automation, and emerging integration approaches can improve CRM experiences while protecting sensitive financial information and maintaining appropriate human oversight.
This is an architecture-focused individual contributor role with cross-team technical leadership responsibilities. Technical depth and targeted hands-on experimentation are important, but the primary accountability is solution architecture, design assurance, and engineering enablement rather than day-to-day production development.
Key responsibilities
Business discovery and solution shaping
Partner with business leaders, product owners, business analysts, and delivery teams to understand customer journeys, business processes, operational challenges, and desired outcomes.
Lead discovery workshops and architecture working sessions to clarify requirements, identify dependencies, surface assumptions, and resolve ambiguity.
Translate business needs into functional capabilities, system interactions, data requirements, and measurable nonfunctional requirements.
Develop and compare solution options, explaining trade-offs across business value, security, complexity, delivery effort, operating cost, and long-term maintainability.
Recommend when to use native Salesforce capabilities, configuration, custom development, third-party products, or services outside the Salesforce platform.
Salesforce CRM solution architecture
Define end-to-end architectures across Salesforce CRM capabilities, relevant industry solutions, enterprise integrations, and supporting data platforms.
Establish appropriate boundaries between Salesforce and enterprise systems of record, including customer, account, product, transaction, and reference-data platforms.
Design customer and relationship data models, business workflows, access models, integration patterns, and reusable platform capabilities.
Guide architectural decisions involving platform capabilities like Salesforce Flow, Apex, Lightning Web Components, APIs, event-driven integration, and declarative versus programmatic implementation.
Address Salesforce-specific constraints, including governor limits, API consumption, transaction boundaries, data volumes, sharing complexity, and platform scalability.
Define requirements for performance, availability, resilience, recoverability, observability, accessibility, and supportability.
Promote reusable patterns and sustainable platform evolution while minimizing unnecessary customization and technical debt.
Architecture artifacts, governance, and engineering handoff
Produce and maintain clear conceptual, logical, and detailed solution designs appropriate to the complexity and risk of each initiative.
Create UML and other architecture artifacts that communicate system context, components, interactions, data flows, trust boundaries, and deployment considerations.
Prepare architecture review submissions that include solution options, recommendations, architectural decisions, security considerations, dependencies, and implementation implications.
Present proposed architectures to Architecture Review Boards and other applicable governance forums; explain design rationale to technical and nontechnical audiences.
Engage cybersecurity, data governance, privacy, operational risk, and other control partners early enough to incorporate requirements into the design.
Track review feedback, resolve design issues, document approved exceptions, and maintain traceability between requirements, decisions, controls, and solution artifacts.
Deliver engineering-ready architecture packages with sufficient detail to support implementation planning, estimation, development, and testing.
Conduct structured handoff sessions, resolve architectural questions during delivery, and assess material design changes against approved decisions.
Apply governance proportionately, using reusable patterns and high-quality evidence to improve review efficiency without weakening controls.
Cybersecurity and sensitive-data protection
Embed security and privacy into Salesforce solution designs, with particular attention to sensitive customer and financial information.
Define identity, authentication, authorization, least-privilege access, record sharing, field-level security, and integration access requirements.
Partner with cybersecurity specialists on threat modeling, trust-boundary analysis, third-party connectivity, and security-control selection.
Address data classification, encryption, masking, retention, auditability, consent, and nonproduction data protection as applicable.
Ensure designs clearly identify control ownership and the boundaries between Salesforce platform responsibilities and enterprise implementation responsibilities.
Generative AI, agentic AI, and experimentation
Identify CRM use cases where generative AI, AI agents, or intelligent automation can improve customer service, banker productivity, relationship management, and operational efficiency.
Design solutions that consider Salesforce Agentforce, enterprise AI services, grounded knowledge retrieval, and governed access to CRM and enterprise data.
Define agent responsibilities, permitted actions, execution identities, approval boundaries, escalation paths, and human-in-the-loop controls.
Partner with AI governance and cybersecurity teams to address prompt injection, unintended data exposure, inappropriate actions, inaccurate outputs, and other AI-specific risks.
Establish evaluation criteria for AI solutions, including business usefulness, output quality, security, latency, cost, monitoring, and safe failure behavior.
Lead time-boxed experiments and proofs of concept to validate architectural assumptions before recommending broader adoption.
Evaluate emerging interoperability approaches, including Model Context Protocol and agent-to-agent integration where appropriate.
Translate experiment findings into reusable patterns, documented recommendations, and practical adoption roadmaps.
Distinguish between capabilities suitable for controlled experimentation and those ready for production use.
Technical leadership and platform evolution
Provide architectural guidance and mentorship to architects, engineers, administrators, and delivery partners.
Facilitate constructive technical discussions and build alignment across teams with different priorities and levels of technical knowledge.
Maintain awareness of Salesforce releases, platform direction, emerging architecture patterns, and relevant financial-services technology developments.
Contribute to CRM architecture roadmaps, reference architectures, design standards, and technical-debt reduction priorities.
Partner with engineering and operations teams on significant production issues when architectural analysis or design changes are required.
Typical day-to-day activities
A typical day may include:
Facilitating a discovery session with other architects, cyber security, business and product stakeholders.
Comparing Salesforce-native and enterprise integration options for a new CRM capability.
Authoring artifacts like sequence diagrams, conceptual diagrams, data-flow model, or security designs.
Working with cybersecurity and data teams to resolve a design concern.
Preparing or presenting an architecture review submission.
Walking engineers through an approved design and clarifying implementation boundaries.
Reviewing a proposed implementation change for architectural impact.
Testing an emerging AI capability in a controlled environment and documenting the findings.
Identifying areas of technical debt and creating remediation proposals
Reviewing current processes (e.g. – CI\CD pipeline), identify opportunities for improvements\efficiency gains
Provide input into the use of AI within the Salesforce ecosystem
Core architecture deliverables
Depending on initiative scope, you will be accountable for producing or coordinating:
Solution architecture document: Business context, scope, requirements, assumptions, options, recommended design, and dependencies.
Architecture diagrams: System context, conceptual and logical views, UML component and sequence diagrams, and deployment views where relevant.
Data architecture: Entity relationships, systems of record, data ownership, lineage, classification, and lifecycle requirements.
Integration design: Interface responsibilities, API and event contracts, authentication, error handling, reconciliation, and recovery patterns.
Security and control design: Access models, trust boundaries, threat considerations, control requirements, and ownership.
Nonfunctional requirements: Measurable performance, resilience, capacity, recovery, monitoring, and supportability expectations.
Decision and governance records: Architecture decision records, trade-off analyses, review outcomes, and approved exceptions.
Engineering handoff package: Approved designs, implementation constraints, acceptance criteria, unresolved dependencies, and design walkthroughs.
AI design and evaluation package, where applicable: Grounding sources, agent permissions, action boundaries, evaluation results, oversight, and fallback behavior.
Required qualifications
Eight or more years of progressive experience in technology architecture, solution design, enterprise applications, or related disciplines, including substantial experience designing Salesforce solutions.
Demonstrated experience leading architecture for complex Salesforce CRM initiatives involving enterprise integrations, multiple stakeholder groups, and sensitive business data.
Strong understanding of Salesforce platform architecture, data modeling, security and sharing, automation, integration patterns, and platform limits.
Experience across multiple IT disciplines, with a demonstrated understanding of application, integration, data, security, cloud, and operational architecture concepts.
Experience using system and process analysis to translate business requirements into conceptual, logical, and detailed design artifacts.
Proficiency creating UML diagrams, data-flow diagrams, architecture decision records, and other artifacts that communicate complex designs clearly.
Experience navigating architecture review governance and producing design packages suitable for engineering handoff.
Strong business analysis, solution-shaping, stakeholder interaction management, facilitation, and presentation skills.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to facilitate technical conversations with nontechnical stakeholders.
Experience incorporating cybersecurity requirements into solution designs and collaborating with security specialists.
Sufficient technical depth to evaluate implementation approaches, review design conformance, and conduct targeted prototypes without serving as the primary production developer.
Ability to assess emerging technologies critically and distinguish practical business value from unnecessary complexity.
Desired qualifications
Experience in financial services, including an understanding of the roles of consumer and custodial banks and experience handling sensitive financial data.
Experience with Salesforce Financial Services Cloud and relevant Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, or Experience Cloud capabilities.
Familiarity with banking customer and household relationships, onboarding, servicing, referrals, relationship management, or related CRM processes.
Experience with Salesforce Agentforce, Data 360, generative AI, retrieval-augmented generation, or agentic solution design.
Experience designing governed AI integrations with enterprise data, APIs, tools, and workflow platforms.
Experience with MuleSoft or comparable integration platforms, API management, event-driven architecture, and enterprise identity services.
Familiarity with Salesforce security, encryption, event monitoring, audit, and data-protection capabilities.
Understanding of Salesforce release management, environment strategy, automated testing, and CI/CD sufficient to define architectural requirements and collaborate effectively with engineering.
Experience leading proofs of concept and translating findings into production architecture recommendations.
Relevant Salesforce architect certifications or equivalent demonstrated architectural expertise.
Education
Bachelor's degree in computer science, information systems, software engineering, or a related discipline, or an equivalent combination of education and relevant professional experience.
What success looks like
Business stakeholders understand the proposed solution, its value, and its trade-offs.
Architecture submissions are complete, traceable, and ready for meaningful review.
Engineering teams receive actionable designs with clear responsibilities and implementation boundaries.
Security, data protection, resilience, and operational requirements are addressed before build decisions become costly to change.
Salesforce capabilities are reused appropriately, with unnecessary customization and technical debt actively reduced.
Experiments produce evidence-based decisions and reusable learning.
AI-enabled solutions demonstrate business value within clearly defined risk and oversight boundaries.
Why this opportunity
Help shape the next generation of CRM in financial services. You will combine enterprise-scale architecture with practical experimentation, influence how emerging technologies are adopted, and deepen your expertise across Salesforce, data, cybersecurity, and AI. Your work will connect innovative ideas to implementable designs that improve real customer and colleague experiences.