Job Title: Principal Salesforce DevOps Engineer / DevOps Lead
Location: Tysons Corner, VA (Hybrid / Remote)
Employment Type: Full-Time
Job Summary:
We are seeking a highly experienced Principal Salesforce DevOps Engineer / DevOps Lead to design, establish, and implement the DevOps architecture and CI/CD framework supporting a large-scale Salesforce Health Cloud platform.
This is a highly hands-on engineering role. The successful candidate will be responsible for establishing the Git-based development model, repository strategy, branching approach, CI/CD pipelines, environment promotion processes, deployment automation, and engineering standards used by multiple Salesforce development teams.
The immediate priority is to evaluate the existing Salesforce DevOps approach and establish a more scalable, developer-friendly GitHub/GitLab-based CI/CD model, including the potential transition from Salesforce-specific deployment tools such as Flosum, Gearset, or Copado to custom automated pipelines.
This role requires someone who has personally architected and built enterprise CI/CD pipelines, not simply managed releases or coordinated deployment activities.
Key Responsibilities:
· Design and implement the overall Salesforce DevOps and CI/CD architecture.
· Establish Git-based source control and repository structures supporting Salesforce development teams.
· Build YAML-based CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, or similar technologies.
· Develop reusable scripts, workflows, and automation supporting Salesforce deployments.
· Establish appropriate branching, pull request, merging, validation, and code promotion processes.
· Automate deployments across Development, QA, SIT, UAT, Staging, and Production environments.
· Design the DevOps approach for a multi-org, multi-application Salesforce environment.
· Establish appropriate Salesforce sandbox and environment strategies for multiple development teams.
· Address developer productivity issues including merge conflicts, overwritten changes, code synchronization, and parallel development.
· Evaluate the existing use of Flosum, Gearset, Copado, and Salesforce-native deployment capabilities and recommend the appropriate long-term DevOps approach.
· Lead the transition from the current deployment model toward a standardized Git-centric engineering model.
· Build automation using Salesforce CLI (SF CLI) for validation, testing, metadata deployment, and environment promotion.
· Establish automated quality gates including code validation, automated testing, deployment validation, and approval workflows.
· Support Salesforce metadata and configuration deployments across multiple environments and organizations.
· Establish processes for delta/incremental deployments, dependency management, rollback, hotfixes, and production recovery.
· Integrate automated testing into the CI/CD pipeline and help establish the organization's test automation framework.
· Develop reusable pipeline components and standardized workflows that can support additional Salesforce applications and organizations.
· Troubleshoot complex Salesforce deployment, Git, pipeline, metadata, and environment issues.
· Provide hands-on technical leadership and guidance to senior Salesforce engineers.
· Define DevOps standards, documentation, governance, and engineering best practices while remaining actively involved in implementation.
We are looking for someone who can actually set up the repository, developer feature-branch process, and pipeline all the way through production, rather than merely define the strategy.
Required Qualifications:
- Extensive experience as a Senior, Lead, Principal, or Architect-level DevOps Engineer.
- Strong hands-on experience designing and building CI/CD pipelines from the ground up.
- Strong experience supporting Salesforce development and deployment environments.
- Experience with Salesforce Health Cloud or other enterprise Salesforce Cloud platforms.
- Advanced experience with GitHub and/or GitLab.
- Hands-on experience building GitHub Actions and/or GitLab CI/CD pipelines.
- Strong experience developing YAML-based CI/CD workflows.
- Strong experience with Git including:
- Repository architecture
- Feature branching
- Pull requests
- Merging
- Version control
- Conflict resolution
- Branch protection and governance
- Hands-on experience with Salesforce CLI / SF CLI and Salesforce deployment automation.
- Strong understanding of Salesforce metadata, Apex, Flows, configuration, dependencies, and deployment processes.
- Experience designing pipelines supporting multiple environments including Dev, QA, SIT, UAT, Staging, and Production.
- Experience supporting multi-org and multi-application Salesforce environments.
- Experience implementing automated build validation, testing, code quality checks, and deployment controls.
- Experience solving complex merge-conflict and parallel-development challenges within Salesforce.
- Strong scripting and automation background.
- Ability to work directly with experienced Salesforce engineers and build tooling that improves the developer experience.
- Demonstrated ability to operate at both the architecture and hands-on engineering level.
Highly Desired Experience:
- Hands-on experience with one or more Salesforce DevOps platforms such as:
- Experience migrating or transitioning teams from Salesforce-specific DevOps products toward GitHub/GitLab-based CI/CD pipelines.
- Experience building reusable CI/CD components, workflows, actions, and deployment frameworks.
- Experience with automated regression and integration testing.
- Experience with tools such as Playwright, Selenium, or equivalent test automation frameworks.
- Experience with static code analysis, pipeline quality gates, and automated code validation.
- Experience with deployment rollback, hotfix environments, and production recovery strategies.
- Experience supporting large engineering organizations with multiple Scrum teams and parallel development streams.
- Experience handling PII/PHI or healthcare-related data environments is beneficial.
Initial Priorities:
The first phase of the role should focus on assessing the existing environment and establishing a practical transition plan. The client specifically discussed looking at a six-to-eight-week strategic transition away from the current approach.
The initial priorities would therefore be:
- Assess the current Flosum/Salesforce DevOps implementation, repositories, environments, development workflow, and deployment challenges.
- Define the target Git-based Salesforce DevOps architecture.
- Establish Git repositories and a standardized feature-branch / pull-request development model.
- Build the foundational GitHub Actions/GitLab CI/CD pipelines.
- Automate validation, testing, and deployment between environments.
- Establish the pathway from Dev → QA → SIT → UAT → Staging → Production.
- Reduce merge conflicts and prevent developers from overwriting one another's changes.
- Establish repeatable automation that can later scale across additional Salesforce orgs and applications.
What We're Looking For:
We are specifically looking for a Principal-level DevOps engineer with strong Salesforce experience, rather than a Salesforce Architect, Administrator, Developer, or traditional Release Manager who has only participated in deployments.
The ideal candidate should be able to sit down with the Salesforce engineering team, assess the current environment, and personally begin building:
Git repositories → branching strategy → YAML workflows → automated validation → automated testing → Salesforce deployments → environment promotion → production pipeline.
They should be equally comfortable discussing the architecture with leadership and then going hands-on keyboard to build the solution.
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