Salesforce Director

The Director & SVP of Salesforce Platform is accountable for the health, scalability, and evolution of the Salesforce and nCino ecosystem. This leader owns platform architecture, delivery standards, DevOps, and long‑term sustainability of a mission‑critical platform powering sales, loan origination, underwriting, servicing, and operations.

This role sits at the intersection of business strategy, platform architecture, and execution, ensuring Salesforce is treated as a managed product platform, not a collection of projects. Success requires simultaneously reducing technical debt, modernizing SDLC practices, improving data reliability, and shifting the organization from customization-heavy delivery to a configuration‑first, scalable model.

This role must protect and amplify:

• Strong foundational platforms: Salesforce core with nCino managed package supports complex commercial, retail, and specialty lending workflows.
• Shared data model: Centralized use of standard Salesforce objects (Account, Opportunity, Contact) enables cross‑line visibility.
• High business adoption: Sales and lending teams rely on the platform daily to originate, approve, and service business.
• Experienced delivery teams: Deep institutional knowledge across Salesforce, nCino, and banking workflows.
• Extensive configuration capability: ~80% of platform behavior driven by configuration (Flows, record‑based configuration) as well as Apex.

Where We Lose Time, Quality, or Energy today-

The current state introduces friction and risk that limit speed, reliability, and confidence:

Platform & Architecture Challenges

• Significant technical debt from legacy components, outdated frameworks, and “temporary” fixes that became permanent
• Tight coupling between Salesforce core, nCino, and integrations, limiting resilience and upgrade flexibility
• Data models and integration patterns that block evolution and increase cost per change
• Out‑of‑field limits and object sprawl driven by historical customization

SDLC & Delivery Friction

• SDLC is not fully metadata‑driven, limiting automation and repeatability
• Manual steps across environments, deployments, UAT, and data loads
• Limited version control and sandbox contention leading to overwrites and rework
• Noise in Jira, UAT without formal triage, and frequent developer context switching

Tools & Ecosystem Gaps

• Tool sprawl (Copado, Skuid, scripts, spreadsheets, email‑based workflows)
• Inconsistent adoption and usability across teams
• Heavy reliance on non‑system‑of‑record tools for critical work
• Reporting lag and low confidence due to data freshness and duplication issues

Operating Model Issues

• Platform management (upgrades, cleanup, debt reduction) competes with feature delivery
• Teams operate as order takers rather than consultative partners to the business
• ncino monthly releases conflict with operational capacity, creating upgrade tension

Team & Talent Opportunities:

• Balance senior architectures to avoid hero dependency- build redundancy for critical skills to reduce single‑points‑of‑failure. Recognize engineers who simplify, standardize, and prevent future work
• Create a culture of ownership over outcomes, not ticket completion
• Encourage healthy challenge: “why” before “how”
• Protect focus time and discourage constant firefighting
• Make learning visible and expected (postmortems, demos, brown bags)
• Define clear role expectations in the org (IC vs. Tech Lead vs. Manager vs. Architect)
• Invest in onboarding that teaches business context, not just codebase navigation
• Train teams to engage as consultative partners, not order takers
• Connect engineering work directly to measurable business outcomes
• Improve requirement quality by asking better questions earlier
• Involve engineers earlier in discovery to reduce rework downstream
• Build trust through predictable delivery and transparent tradeoffs

Technology/platform Opportunities:

• Drive parallel transformation across architecture, SDLC, tooling, and operating model, including:
• Shift Salesforce to a true platform operating model, with product‑level ownership, capacity allocation, and success metrics
• Own data privacy, governance, masking, and security standards
• Modernize the SDLC end‑to‑end, including metadata‑driven development, version control, automated pipelines, and standardized environments
• Reduce customization in favor of configuration, especially where nCino/SF OOTB can be leveraged
• Rationalize tools and UI overlays (e.g., replacing Skuid‑based overlays where they constrain modernization)
• Stabilize data pipelines by moving critical jobs in‑house and introducing transparency around data freshness
• Enforce architectural standards that support quarterly nCino releases without disruption
• Institutionalize platform cleanup, allocating ongoing capacity to reduce debt, retire unused fields, consolidate flows, and standardize data models
• Elevate the engagement model with the business from request‑driven delivery to advisory, outcome‑based partnership