Director Salesforce Platform

Director Salesforce Platform

The Director Salesforce Platform is the enterprise platform owner for Ryder's Salesforce ecosystem. The role sets the vision, operating model, investment priorities, and guardrails for Salesforce instances serving FMS, SCS, and RLM. This leader is accountable for platform health, security, reliability, data integrity, lifecycle management, and sustained business value. Success requires more than technical depth. The Director must be a highly collaborative enterprise leader who can earn trust across business segments, align leaders with different priorities, create shared accountability, and turn complex business needs into a coherent Salesforce roadmap. The role leads through both influence and authority, chairs the cross-functional Salesforce Center of Excellence (CoE), develops talent, guides distributed product and support teams, and serves as Ryder's relationship owner with Salesforce. The Director will establish governance that protects the enterprise without creating unnecessary bureaucracy, enabling business and technology teams to innovate safely, reuse capabilities, and deliver better sales and service outcomes.

Essential Functions

• Enterprise Salesforce strategy, roadmap, and governance: Collaborate with key stakeholders to establish a multi-year Salesforce vision, target-state architecture, org strategy, capability roadmap, and investment plan aligned to Ryder's sales, service, customer, data, and digital strategies. Chair and mature the Salesforce Center of Excellence (CoE) as a cross-functional operating model with defined membership, decision rights, intake, prioritization, architecture review, release governance, escalation paths, and success measures.
• Platform health, security, reliability, and operational risk: Maintain clear accountability for platform health across all Salesforce instances, including availability, performance, scalability, environments, licensing, release readiness, technical debt, end-of-life decisions, and operational risk. Ensure that role design, privileged access, duty segmentation, auditability, vulnerability remediation, disaster recovery, continuity planning, privacy, regulatory controls, and production change practices are embedded in platform operations.
• Stakeholder leadership, business alignment, and enterprise decision-making: Build durable relationships with Sales Operations, Service, Product, Application Support, Security, Enterprise Architecture, Data, Integration, Infrastructure, Risk, Finance, Procurement, and business-segment leaders; translate competing priorities into enterprise choices.
• Technical standards, architecture oversight, and solution quality: Create pragmatic guardrails for configuration, development, integration, data, identity, AI, security, testing, DevSecOps, deployment, and support, while providing qualified teams with clear pathways to self-service and innovation.
• Establish and champion Salesforce technical best practices, design principles, and configuration/coding standards; chair the design authority and lead architecture and code/config reviews to ensure the technical quality, scalability, security, and maintainability of solutions built by product and partner teams. Provide expert technical guidance and mentoring and hold solutions accountable to enterprise standardswithout owning solution design or delivery.
• Partner with enterprise architects and data leaders to define reference architectures, integration and API patterns, identity and access models, master-data responsibilities, retention practices, data-quality controls, and a path toward consistent customer and asset information.
• Platform rationalization, consolidation, and lifecycle management: Lead the assessment, rationalization, and consolidation of Salesforce instances, products, integrations, data models, and customizations; develop transition roadmaps that preserve business continuity and measurable benefits.
• Vendor, financial, commercial, and innovation management: Evaluate Salesforce platform releases and emerging capabilities through structured experimentation, architectural review, security assessment, and value-based adoption decisions. Serve as Ryder's principal relationship owner with Salesforce, lead account planning, executive governance, licensing and consumption management, renewals, commercial negotiations, escalations, partner strategy, performance reviews, and roadmap discussions. Own platform financial planning, forecasts, business cases, TCO, benefit tracking, vendor spend, license optimization, and investment trade-offs; clearly communicate the cost, risk, and value implications of platform decisions.

Additional Responsibilities

• Bring leaders from multiple business segments and technology disciplines together around common outcomes, principles, and priorities, even when local objectives conflict.
• Navigate a matrixed organization, facilitate constructive debate, surface trade-offs, and drive decisions without relying solely on positional authority.
• Anticipate stakeholder impacts, sponsor adoption, address resistance, coordinate communications and training, and reinforce new operating practices until they are sustained.
• Translate platform complexity into concise business choices, recommendations, and outcomes for senior executives while maintaining credibility with technical experts.
• Optimize Ryder-wide value, customer experience, security, and maintainability over local convenience; resolve conflicts respectfully and make difficult decisions when needed.
• Encourage curiosity, responsiveness, continuous improvement, practical problem solving, and close partnership between business and technology teams.
• Partners with Enterprise Infrastructure, Security, Integration Services & Data Services to own and drive application/product related vulnerability remediation.
• Perform other duties as assigned

Skills and Abilities

• Builds coalitions, aligns competing interests, defines shared outcomes, and makes enterprise-level decisions in a matrixed environment., Required
• Listens, facilitates, negotiates, resolves conflict, and establishes trusting partnerships across business and technology teams., Required
• Attracts, develops, coaches, and retains talent; builds succession depth; creates accountability and an inclusive, high-performing culture., Required
• Connects business strategy, customer outcomes, architecture, risk, investment, and execution in a clear multi-year plan., Required
• Leads operating-model and process change with intentional stakeholder engagement, communication, training, and adoption practices., Required
• Converts technical complexity into concise recommendations, trade-offs, business outcomes, and decision-ready presentations., Required

Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Information Systems, Computer Science, Engineering, Business, or related field, Required
• 10 years or more in progressive technology leadership with responsibility for enterprise platforms, products, or customer-facing business applications., Required
• 10 years or more in leadership of Salesforce or comparable enterprise SaaS/CRM platforms in a large, complex, multi-business-unit environment., Required
• 7 years or more in leading managers and/or senior professionals and influencing cross-functional teams beyond direct reporting lines. Establishing or materially maturing a Salesforce CoE, platform operating model, governance, and portfolio-management capability., Required
• 5 years or more in leading Salesforce org/instance rationalization or consolidation, including business-process, data, integration, security, and change impacts., Required
• 5 years or more in executive stakeholder management, vendor/commercial negotiations, financial planning, and business-case/benefit realization., Required
• Salesforce multi-org strategy, platform architecture, environment strategy, lifecycle, limits, and technical-debt management. Advanced, Required
• Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Experience Cloud, Field Service, platform automation, analytics, and enterprise integration patterns. Advanced, Required
• Identity and access, data governance, privacy, security controls, auditability, resilience, and regulated-enterprise practices. Advanced, Required
• Product operating models, agile portfolio management, DevSecOps/CI-CD, release governance, IT service management, and support models. Advanced, Preferred
• Vendor, licensing, commercial, budget, TCO, business-case, and benefit-realization management Advanced, Preferred
• Data Cloud, AI/Agentforce, analytics, and emerging Salesforce technologies, including considerations for responsible adoption. Intermediate, Preferred
• Salesforce Administrator, Advanced Administrator, or Platform App Builder (At hire or equivalent experience), Preferred, Upon Hire
• Salesforce Application Architect, System Architect, or relevant domain consultant certification (At hire or within agreed development plan), Preferred, 120 Days
• ITIL, product management, agile, architecture, security, or change-management certification (At hire or equivalent experience), Preferred, Upon Hire

Candidates must be authorized to work for any employer in the United States and will not require current or future visa sponsorship.

Travel

• Yes, 10-20%

Job Category: IT Leadership

Our Culture & Commitment

At Ryder, you're trusted to make an impactwhile enjoying room to grow and having a voice that's heard. Our culture is built on respect, collaboration, and shared pride in doing great work rooted in innovation and safety.

Your Voice. Your Success. The Future We Build Together.

Compensation Information

The compensation offered to a candidate may be influenced by a variety of factors