Principal Salesforce Engineer, Marketing Cloud

About the position

The Thrivent Financial Marketing Technology team is looking for a Principal Engineer to lead the design and evolution of our integrated marketing ecosystem, with a strong focus on Salesforce Marketing Cloud and its orchestration across platforms. Working within a Product Operating Model, you'll collaborate with cross-functional teams to deliver scalable, cloud-based solutions that support personalized, data-driven marketing at scale. This role requires deep technical expertise in MarTech architecture, event-driven systems, and marketing automation, along with a strong understanding of how to integrate with modern platforms. You'll influence architectural direction, mentor engineers, and ensure alignment with enterprise strategy while enabling rapid delivery and continuous improvement.

Responsibilities

• Designing Solutions: Apply expert industry knowledge and broad understanding of multiple disciplines with deep technical expertise to drive outcomes for customers. Create the overall design and architecture for the Marketing Technology team, articulating component interactions across systems and product groups. Independently lead solution design initiatives aligned with Thrivent's broader software engineering strategy. Leverage platforms or technologies such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Kafka, and Java-based applications to architect scalable, integrated marketing solutions.
• Implementing Solutions: Use critical thinking and data-driven insights to solve complex, high-impact problems. Lead the development of the most architecturally significant components within the marketing technology ecosystem. Establish engineering structures and reusable patterns that enable teams to collaborate effectively. Build and integrate solutions using tools such as enterprise APIs, Informatica, Kafka Topics, enterprise data warehouse.
• Learning and Applying New Techniques: Lead research and experimentation with emerging technologies and best practices. Share findings across the organization to elevate engineering capabilities and innovation.
• Collaborating Within the Team: Participate in team collaboration sessions to remove technical roadblocks and provide architectural guidance. Support product planning by helping translate business needs into technical user stories. Act as a technical leader in system design across multiple teams, ensuring alignment with strategic goals. Facilitate solution design and implementation across product teams to support critical marketing initiatives.
• Collaborating Across Teams: Promote adherence to enterprise technology standards and target architecture across teams. Provide deep technical expertise to ensure cohesive system design and integration across marketing and adjacent platforms.
• Collaborating Across the Organization: Serve as an expert in designing, developing, and analyzing system architecture across hardware and software layers. Collaborate with other product teams to provide technical leadership and mentorship. Create and maintain enterprise design patterns that guide Thrivent's strategic technology vision. Provide feedback loops from engineering teams to operations to support product operationalization.
• Setting Product/Platform Technology Strategy: Define high-level capability requirements for marketing platforms and collaborate across the organization to deliver on them. Provide platform-specific expertise to internal and cross-functional teams, ensuring alignment with business and technical goals.
• Defining Engineering Standards/Patterns: Partner with internal and external engineering communities to establish and evolve best practices. Define and disseminate engineering standards across teams, helping engineers apply them to deliver consistent, high-quality solutions. Represent Thrivent in external forums, including open-source contributions and industry meetups.
• DevOps: Lead the resolution of critical incidents and proactively address production issues. Introduce technologies and practices that improve system stability, scalability, and resilience. Evaluate and implement CI/CD improvements to enhance product reliability and delivery speed. Build partnerships across technical domains to influence DevOps strategy and execution.
• Selecting and Managing Technology Vendors: Provide technical consultation during the evaluation of third-party software and platforms. Contribute to the selection criteria and strategic fit of vendor solutions within the marketing technology landscape.
• Coaching Engineers: Mentor engineers across product groups, reinforcing best practices and architectural principles. Provide technical leadership and facilitate knowledge-sharing through training sessions and demos.
• Recruiting and Building Talent: Engage with the tech community to promote Thrivent's technology brand and attract top talent. Support recruitment efforts by participating in interviews and talent evaluation. Model Thrivent's leadership competencies: Model the Way, Rally the Team, and Deliver Outcomes. Foster a culture of continuous improvement, employee engagement, and client-centric innovation.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related technical field, or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years of experience in software engineering.
• 5+ years of experience leading high-performing technology teams.
• Proven ability to influence both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Demonstrated leadership and participation in the broader technology community.
• Meets or exceeds all expectations of a Lead Engineer role.
• Hands-on experience with marketing technologies such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Salesforce CRM (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud), and Java-based applications.

Nice-to-haves

• Master's degree in a related field.
• Experience in the financial services industry.
• Experience coaching and mentoring engineering talent.
• Experience with marketing applications such as Social Platforms (Sprinklr, Hearsay Social), Paid Media (LiveRamp), Tag Management Tools (e.g., Google Tag Manager, Adobe Tag Manager).

Benefits

• Various bonuses (including, for example, annual or long-term incentives)
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Health savings account
• Flexible spending account
• 401k
• Pension
• Life and accidental death and dismemberment insurance
• Disability insurance
• Supplemental protection insurance
• 20 days of Paid Time Off each year
• Sick and Safe Time
• 10 paid company holidays
• Volunteer Time Off
• Paid parental leave
• EAP
• Well-being benefits
• Other employee benefits