System Specialist Lead

About the Team

The Data 360 & Visualization Platform Operations team keeps the platforms that run Salesforce's own business running. We operate Data 360, CRM Analytics, and Tableau, the data and analytics foundation for how Salesforce sells, serves, and makes decisions. We are Customer Zero: we run these products at enterprise scale first, and what we learn goes back to the product teams.

• Keep it up. Monitoring, alerting, and frontline incident response that catch problems before customers do.
• Make it stable. Root-cause analysis of recurring failures, plus closing security and compliance findings.
• Run it well. Cataloging supported assets, tracking run costs, and keeping practices consistent.
• Make it easy to get help. One clear way to ask for support, backed by automation and AI agents.
• Be Customer Zero. Regular performance reviews, with the evidence fed to product and engineering.

What it's like to join at this level

You'll be the go-to person for production on your platforms. You'll own how escalations work, swarm incidents alongside reliability engineers, shape how the team operates, and set the standard for processes, documentation, readiness, and reliability. You'll partner with reliability and engineering leaders, work with vendors, and raise the skills of every analyst around you.

Who thrives here

You've run production through hard days and stay calm when it matters. You see patterns across incidents and turn them into durable fixes. You teach naturally, communicate well with senior stakeholders, and favor automation over heroics.

What Are We Looking For?

As a Systems Specialist Lead, Data Foundations, you'll be the go-to expert for escalations across cases, investigations, and production events on Salesforce's enterprise data and analytics platforms. You'll be a frontline leader in incidents, swarming with our reliability engineers, who own incident response alongside Incident Command.

You'll own how escalations work, how quickly and well we respond to and resolve requests, how satisfied our customers and partners are, readiness, root-cause quality, and the lightweight processes and reference material that support teams rely on. You'll mentor and guide analysts and senior analysts, and you'll work with engineering, reliability, vendors, and business leaders.

You are an individual contributor and a technical and operational leader.

What You'll Actually Be Doing

• Own the escalation model for cases, intake, investigations, and SOPs across teams, vendors, and time zones: define paths, severity and priority criteria, handoffs, and the thresholds for pulling in Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), and make sure escalations are worked to closure.
• Set expectations with the SRE lead for how Specialists and SREs swarm incidents together: Specialists are the frontline and first connect, SREs own incident resolution, and Incident Command is an external role you work with. Make sure the case, intake, and stakeholder communication side of every major incident is covered, up to executives.
• Analyze escalation trendlines (volume, repeat causes, time to engage, time to resolve) and turn them into reliability, staffing, and platform engineering priorities.
• Partner with SREs on disaster recovery planning and tests for your platform area, bringing the support and readiness view.
• Contribute case and intake learnings to post-incident reviews led by SREs, and make sure support follow-ups (SOPs, reference material, routing) get done.
• Resolve complex declarative and code issues, and close RCAs with fixes that prevent recurrence.
• Identify system, process, and technical-debt gaps, and recommend resolutions and priorities to leadership.
• Contribute to design reviews and shape reliability practices, including Operational Readiness gates for releases.
• Define monitoring, alerting, and self-healing automation with SRE and engineering partners.
• Own SLA delivery and backlog health for your vertical or platform.
• Refine, track, and improve the Intake + Investigation lifecycle SLAs: First Response Time (FRT), Next Response Time (NRT), and Average Resolution Time (ART). Set targets by severity and case type, report on them regularly, and drive improvements from the trends.
• Track case and stakeholder satisfaction (CSAT, NPS): set up how feedback is collected, analyze themes, and turn them into process, staffing, and platform engineering improvements.
• Hold yourself and the team to the same SLA and satisfaction targets, with L6 leads mentoring and challenging and L5s supporting.
• Manage complex enhancement projects from inception to support transition, balancing multiple projects and priorities.
• Apply advanced platform knowledge and intermediate coding (Apex, Python, SQL) to solve difficult issues and automate recurring work.
• Own process engineering for your area: templates, process design, capture, and lifecycle (create, review, update, retire) for lightweight SOPs and Support Reference Manuals (SRMs). This is process design, not technical writing.
• Set the standards and templates that other teams adopt, and make Platform Engineering's SRM inputs a required part of release readiness.
• Request SRM inputs from Platform Engineering and create or manage them as needed.
• Design runbooks and knowledge content for reuse, with automation and self-service where possible.
• Own support playbook development and lifecycle for your area.
• Manage vendor relationships and service levels, and work with scrum teams, product, and engineering as the operations liaison.
• Build working relationships with business stakeholders and teams beyond your immediate group to advance shared initiatives.
• Apply security and compliance policies in complex situations, and own implementation for your area.
• Own technology compliance activities, audit and SOX evidence, and closure of findings.
• Uphold the SDLC (Agile) and change, deployment, incident, and problem management processes.
• Coach and mentor Systems Analysts and Senior Analysts, give constructive feedback to the manager, and raise the team's technical bar.
• Teach new technology and business requirements across a global team.
• Influence senior leaders on operational priorities and risk.
• On-call and travel as required, subject to local regulations. Other related duties as required.

You're Our Person If...

• Degree or equivalent relevant experience required. Experience will be evaluated based on the core competencies for the role (e.g. extracurricular leadership roles, military experience, volunteer roles, work experience, etc.)
• 5+ years of platform-specific development, implementation, or support experience in an enterprise IT environment.
• Advanced knowledge of Salesforce native functionality and best practices.
• Intermediate knowledge of coding languages (Apex, Python, SQL).
• Proven experience managing escalations across cases, investigations, and incidents across teams and time zones, including frontline incident response and knowing when to pull in reliability engineers.
• Experience owning RCAs, and designing the processes, SOPs, and reference manuals for a platform or business process vertical.
• Experience defining, tracking, and improving service level metrics (for example FRT, NRT, ART) and satisfaction measures (CSAT, NPS).
• Demonstrated ability to build relationships across engineering, product, and business teams.
• Ability to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical and senior audiences.
• Ability to work independently with little supervision in a distributed, global team.
• Certifications (achieved): Salesforce Administrator (ADM-201), Advanced Administrator (ADM-211), and Platform Developer I.

Even Better If...

• Certifications: Data 360, Tableau, Platform Developer II, Platform App Builder, or other specialist or architect certifications.
• Hands-on experience with Data 360, Agentforce, CRM Analytics, or Tableau.
• Experience working with SRE practices, SLOs, and o