A Salesforce Principal at Ness is the most senior practitioner on an engagement. You own how the solution is shaped and how it gets delivered — from the requirement baseline that defines what we build, through the design and the impact assessment, to the working software the client signs off. You are the person the client’s sponsors deal with and the person the squad looks to when the picture is incomplete.

This is a hands-on role. Senior practitioners here establish the framework rather than execute inside someone else’s. You will lead the work and you will also do some of it, particularly the parts that decide whether the rest is right.

What you will own

What we are looking for

Experience

• Twelve years or more in enterprise business systems, with six or more delivering Salesforce and at least three as the most senior practitioner on an engagement rather than a contributor to one.
• Deep Sales Cloud, and direct hands-on experience of Revenue Lifecycle Management or CPQ — quoting, pricing, approvals, contracts and the path to order. This is not negotiable for this role.
• You have delivered change inside a large, mature, heavily customised org — one with competing regional configurations, real technical debt and automation nobody fully remembers building — without breaking what was already there.
• You have led a squad through agile delivery: sprints, ceremonies, a groomed backlog and user stories with acceptance criteria a developer can build from without asking what you meant.
• You are credible in front of a client sponsor group and can hold a position with a VP who disagrees with you.
• Salesforce certifications: Administrator and Sales Cloud Consultant as a baseline. Revenue Cloud, Advanced Administrator or an Architect-track certification is a strong advantage.

Technical depth

You do not need to write production Apex. You do need to do all of the following without waiting for someone else.

• Read an org’s metadata and establish what a proposed change actually touches — flows, Apex, triggers, approval processes, record types, page layouts, permission sets and integrations.
• Design for a multi-region org where regions share objects, automation and picklists, and where a change made for one region reaches another unless it is deliberately contained.
• Work in VS Code with the Salesforce CLI, or get there quickly. Where a piece of analysis needs a tool you have not used, you find the tool and learn it rather than reporting that the analysis cannot be done.
• Use AI tooling well and sceptically — as an accelerator whose output you verify, not as an answer you forward. We expect you to use it and we expect you to catch it when it is wrong.

How you work

This carries as much weight as the experience, and it is what we assess most closely.

• You take ownership without being asked. You identify what is needed, plan it and drive it. Nobody has to send you a list.
• You raise problems early. When something is going wrong you say so while it can still be fixed, and you bring a proposed way forward with it. Going quiet as a deadline approaches is the one behaviour we cannot work with.
• You answer the question you were asked. Directly, and with a time attached when the answer is not yet available.
• You check before you assert. You do not present something as new until you have confirmed it is not already known.
• You are comfortable being the most accountable person in the room, including when the news is bad and the client is unhappy.
• You develop the people around you. You explain why, not only what, because that is how a junior becomes someone the practice can rely on.

How the role is measured

The first engagement

You would step into a live, high-visibility programme for a global fleet-services client. It is a single Salesforce org shared between Europe and North America, mid-way through a regional transformation, with an agreed requirement baseline of over two hundred items, an active build squad and a client sponsor group that is engaged and demanding. There is genuine technical debt, a real architecture problem to solve and a business that knows what it wants.

It is a good role for someone who enjoys the hard version of this work. It is not a good role for someone who wants a tidy greenfield build.

This role is not for you if

• You are looking to move into management and away from the platform. This is a senior practitioner track by design.
• You prefer to be given a defined scope rather than to establish one.
• You would rather escalate a problem than propose a solution to it.
• You want predictable weeks. Most are; some are not, and the difference usually lands on this role.

How we will assess this

So that candidates know what to expect, and so that we test for what the role requires rather than for interview technique.

On the exercise: we expect candidates to use AI tooling and would think less of someone who did not. What we assess is whether you verified what it produced. An answer that confidently references a field which does not exist in the org will not progress — and that is the entire point of the exercise.

What we offer

• A senior practitioner track that does not require you to stop doing the work to progress.
• Genuine autonomy. We do not manage hours; we agree outcomes and expect you to be reachable when it counts.
• Complex, senior client work with sponsors who make decisions, in a practice that is growing.
• Competitive base, bonus and benefits, calibrated to experience and market.

Ness Digital Engineering is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from every background and are glad to discuss the adjustments that would let you do your best work, at any stage of the process.