Associate Vice President, Salesforce Engineering & Development in London

About Us

Infotech is a global IT research and advisory company helping technology leaders make better decisions. Our Commercial Technology organization develops and supports the Salesforce platform and custom applications that enable our commercial operations.

The Opportunity

We are seeking an accomplished, hands-on-minded engineering executive to build and lead our Salesforce engineering and development organization. This is not a steady-state operating role: you will establish stronger engineering management, quality practices, release discipline, technical governance, and AI-enabled development across three Salesforce scrum teams and a Salesforce administration function. You will lead through five direct reports: three Development Managers, a Quality Engineering Lead, and a Salesforce Administration Manager, all while partnering as a peer with Product Management and collaborating closely with a separate Architecture organization within IT. The mandate is to build a cohesive, accountable, high-performing engineering organization. You must be credible in detailed technical discussions, able to challenge designs constructively, and equally capable of developing leaders, improving delivery systems, and driving sustained change.

What You’ll Do

• Lead, coach, hire, and performance-manage five leaders: three Salesforce Development Managers, the Quality Engineering Lead, and the Salesforce Administration Manager.
• Build a consistent operating cadence while preserving accountability within each scrum team.
• Set and execute a multi-quarter engineering maturity roadmap spanning software development practices, code review, testing, security, technical debt, release management, observability, incident response, and production support.
• Own engineering delivery and execution for three Salesforce scrum teams; partner with Product Management on priorities, capacity, estimates, trade-offs, sequencing, and achievable commitments.
• Build a quality engineering discipline with the QA Lead: shift testing earlier in sprint planning, scale maintainable automated tests, reinforce developer-owned unit/integration testing, and create measurable release quality gates.
• Establish consistent Git-based development and reliable release processes across all three Salesforce scrum teams, including deployment planning, sandbox-refresh coordination, release readiness, rollback procedures, and post-release validation.
• Partner with IT Architecture and existing DevOps resources on CI/CD tooling and shared environment services.
• Assess and evolve the Salesforce DevOps operating model, clarifying ownership of CI/CD, pipeline administration, environment management, deployment automation, and release execution.
• Reduce manual work, approval bottlenecks, and single-person dependencies; recommend process and organizational changes.
• Maintain clear boundaries between architectural design accountability (in IT) and engineering implementation, release execution, and application operational accountability (in this organization).
• Challenge impractical designs and surface technical risks early without duplicating the Architecture function.
• Lead an AI-enabled engineering improvement agenda: evaluate secure coding assistants and automation, establish adoption guardrails with IT/security, upskill teams, and measure genuine productivity and quality improvements.
• Oversee the Salesforce administration/service-request function, including intake, prioritization, support levels, recurring issue analysis, service metrics, escalation, and coordination between admin/configuration and development work.
• Create transparent engineering metrics and management processes covering delivery predictability, cycle time, deployment frequency, change failure, recovery time, escaped defects, automation reliability, service responsiveness, and team health.
• Use data to improve outcomes rather than gaming metrics.
• Build a sustainable talent strategy across North America and India, including leadership development, hiring, onboarding, documentation, cross-time-zone collaboration, and knowledge transfer from external partners.
• Partner with Product, Architecture, Security, IT, and business leaders during critical incidents, major releases, and significant technical decisions; communicate risks, options, and progress credibly to senior executives.

What You Bring

• 12+ years of progressive software engineering experience, including significant hands-on technical development earlier in your career and 5+ years managing engineering managers or multiple development teams.
• Demonstrated success building or transforming an engineering organization where processes, automation, governance, and accountability were not already mature.
• Strong technical expertise in Salesforce engineering, including Apex, Lightning Web Components, APIs/integrations, complex custom applications, deployment strategies, platform constraints, and production reliability.
• Ability to review designs and ask detailed technical questions without needing to be the principal coder.
• Experience operating a multi-team Agile engineering organization with mature practices in CI/CD, automated testing, source control, environment management, release coordination, and incident management.
• Ability to partner, and constructively disagree, with senior architecture leaders; experience establishing working agreements, decision rights, and practical documentation standards across organizational boundaries.
• Experience developing strong managers, building accountable teams, improving distributed collaboration, and coordinating technical delivery with nontechnical product leadership.
• Practical understanding of AI-assisted software development, including security, code quality, developer adoption, and measurable value realization.
• Excellent executive communication, prioritization, change leadership, and stakeholder-management skills; sound judgment in balancing speed, maintainability, risk, and business impact.

Nice to Have

• Experience with highly customized Salesforce CPQ, quote-to-cash, pricing, contracting, or commercial operations platforms.
• Experience in sourcing externally managed development teams and improving operational knowledge transfer.
• Experience overseeing a service-request/administration function alongside software engineering and quality engineering.
• Experience across both US/Canadian and India-based delivery teams.

What Success Looks Like

• First 30 days: establish relationships with Product and IT Architecture, assess the three scrum teams and admin function, baseline delivery/quality/support performance, review existing Salesforce DevOps responsibilities and tooling, and identify critical near-term risks.
• First 90 days: publish a prioritized engineering improvement roadmap and clear decision-rights agreement with Architecture and Product; introduce consistent release, QA, operational, and engineering leadership cadences; assess the Salesforce DevOps operating model and recommend future enhancements; support the CPQ team’s transition to internal delivery leadership.
• Within 6 months: demonstrate more predictable releases, visible testing and deployment standards across all three teams, a functioning automation improvement plan, stronger architecture documentation and design reviews, measurable improvements in service-request management, and a clearly defined, scalable Salesforce DevOps operating model with agreed ownership and reduced critical dependencies.
• Within 12 months: sustain a high-performing engineering management bench, stronger production stability, reduced dependency on manual testing and external development support, and demonstrable improvements from responsibly adopted AI tooling.

Infotech is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion and does not discriminate on the basis of any legally protected status or characteristic including Minority/Female/Sexual Orientation/Gender Identity/Disability/Veteran and are pleased to consider all qualified applicants. To that end, upon request, Infotech will ensure, to the extent possible, that accommodation be made available to applicants throughout the recruitment and hiring process.

This hiring process uses artificial intelligence (AI) to assist in assessing applicants.