[Hiring] Director, Enterprise Architecture & Engineering @Kicksaw

Role Description

The Director, Enterprise Architecture & Engineering is a senior leadership role responsible for setting Kicksaw's enterprise technical direction and building an engineering organization that can scale with the business. Salesforce remains core, but the mandate is broader: connect CRM, custom software, data, integration, cloud, security, DevOps, analytics, and AI into secure, resilient, maintainable solutions.

This leader reports to the Vice President of Delivery, directly manages engineers and technical leaders, and stays close enough to the work to make hard architecture decisions. The role combines enterprise architecture, engineering management, client leadership, and operating-system ownership. It requires initiative and the ability to move important work through ambiguity, competing priorities, legacy practices, and organizational friction.

Culture & Values at Kicksaw

• Care Deeply - For each other and our impact
• Own the Outcome - Lean in, speak up, solve it, own it
• Win Together - No one gets far alone
• Raise the Bar - Aim higher every day
• Be the Spark - Energy and passion are contagious

As a Director, Enterprise Architecture & Engineering you'll embody these values by building trust with our clients, taking full ownership of your engagements, and guiding your team to deliver high-quality solutions with purpose.

Key Responsibilities

• Enterprise architecture and technical leadership
  • Set enterprise architecture strategy, principles, decision rights, and reusable reference patterns across Kicksaw's client portfolio.
  • Lead the most complex architecture decisions and design reviews, balancing business value, security, scalability, reliability, maintainability, and cost.
  • Define how Salesforce, Apex, Python, APIs, data, integration, cloud services, and analytics work together.
  • Turn recurring delivery risks into reusable standards and accelerators.
• Engineering systems, AI, security, and compliance
  • Build and drive adoption of a standardized engineering operating system spanning source control, branching, peer review, automated testing, CI/CD, environments, release management, observability, rollback, and incident learning.
  • Establish Kicksaw's production AI and agentic engineering approach, including grounded data, model and tool integration, evaluation, guardrails, human oversight, telemetry, cost, security, and lifecycle management.
  • Create reusable AI development patterns so teams do not independently solve grounding, model access, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring on every engagement.
  • Evaluate Salesforce Data 360/Data Cloud, Informatica, MuleSoft, Agentforce, Claudeforce, Claude, cloud data platforms, and other technologies based on business fit and architectural evidence.
  • Embed security, privacy, and compliance into architecture and delivery, including identity and access, least privilege, encryption, secrets, audit logging, resilience, data protection, vulnerability management, and incident response.
• Team leadership and organizational scale
  • Directly manage engineers and technical leaders, with accountability for hiring, performance, coaching, career development, succession, staffing, capacity, and team health.
  • Build Principal and Lead-level bench strength so technical quality and decision-making scale beyond one expert.
  • Create clear expectations, practical capability paths, communities of practice, architecture reviews, and reusable examples that help the team grow.
  • Lead through friction and red tape, making tradeoffs, exceptions, decisions, and escalation paths explicit while maintaining momentum and accountability.
• Client and business partnership
  • Build trusted relationships with client CIOs, CTOs, enterprise architects, security leaders, data leaders, and platform owners.
  • Partner with Sales and Delivery on qualification, discovery, solution shaping, estimation, technical risk, executive presentations, and responsible commitments.
  • Connect technical decisions to client outcomes, delivery quality, operating cost, speed, resilience, revenue, margin, pipeline, retention, and account growth.
  • Develop differentiated offerings, reference architectures, accelerators, and technical points of view that expand Kicksaw's enterprise relevance.

Success Criteria

• Kicksaw has a clear enterprise architecture strategy, lightweight governance model, and decision process that teams use in real delivery work.
• Engineering teams use standardized CI/CD and quality controls across Salesforce and non-Salesforce work, improving flow, reliability, and recovery.
• Kicksaw has a production AI delivery playbook covering value, data, security, evaluation, human oversight, cost, deployment, and operations.
• Security and compliance standards are embedded in architecture and engineering practices for regulated client environments.
• The engineering organization scales into more complex work without concentrating technical decisions or delivery risk in one person.
• Technical leaders and engineers show stronger judgment, confidence, and capability through coaching, reviews, reusable patterns, and meaningful growth paths.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in enterprise architecture, solution architecture, engineering, or technical consulting, including leadership across complex client programs or technical capabilities. Salesforce Certified Technical Architect certification is highly preferred.
• Deep Salesforce architecture and engineering expertise, including Apex, Lightning, platform limits, data and sharing design, integration, security, environments, packaging, and release management.
• Strong engineering fluency beyond Salesforce, including Python, APIs, events, SQL, JavaScript or TypeScript, testing, automation, and application-design patterns.
• Enterprise technology breadth across Salesforce Data 360/Data Cloud, Informatica, MuleSoft or comparable integration platforms, cloud data platforms, AWS/Azure/GCP services, DevOps, and observability.
• Production AI or agentic-system experience covering grounding, orchestration, evaluation, guardrails, observability, security, cost, human oversight, and lifecycle management. Basic ChatGPT use, prompt fluency, or an AI credential alone does not meet this bar.
• Experience designing secure systems in regulated environments and translating HIPAA, HITRUST, FedRAMP, NIST, SOC 2, privacy, or comparable obligations into practical controls.
• Experience standardizing CI/CD, automated quality and security controls, environment and release strategy, deployment evidence, rollback, and operational feedback across teams.
• Significant people-management experience leading engineers and technical leaders, developing successors, and raising quality without creating fear or dependency.
• A record of scaling an engineering organization and its contribution to business growth through talent, operating systems, reusable technology, disciplined investment, and delivery-led growth.
• Strong client, executive, and commercial judgment, with the initiative to explain complex tradeoffs, make decisions through ambiguity and friction, and remain accountable for outcomes.

Benefits

• Fully remote work – Flexibility to do your best work from anywhere.
• Unlimited PTO – We trust you to balance work and life.
• Learning & development stipend – Certifications, training, or conferences.
• Wellness support – Stipends and initiatives to help you feel your best.
• Collaborative, values-driven culture – Work with a high-performing team that supports and challenges you.
• Clear growth path – Opportunities to advance into senior roles.

Company Description

Kicksaw is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants regardless of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity, age, national origin, disability, parental or pregnancy status, marriage and civil partnership, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Reasonable accommodations will be made to meet the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act and will be provided as requested by candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process. All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.