Platform Engineering Lead

📋 Description

• • Architect and own the future of ALU’s digital backbone: you will design, evolve, and govern a Salesforce-centric platform that orchestrates every touchpoint of the student and staff experience across Rwanda and Mauritius campuses, ensuring the architecture is scalable, secure, and extensible for the next decade of growth.
• • Lead the end-to-end Salesforce implementation lifecycle—from requirements gathering and data-model design to Lightning Web Components, Apex triggers, Flow automation, and managed package governance—while enforcing modern engineering practices such as version control with Git, CI/CD via GitHub Actions or SFDX, automated unit/functional testing, and continuous code-quality monitoring.
• • Drive enterprise integration strategy: map business processes across Salesforce, AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, RDS/Aurora, S3), NetSuite ERP, BambooHR, and custom micro-services; design resilient, event-driven integrations using REST, GraphQL, Platform Events, and MuleSoft or equivalent iPaaS, ensuring real-time data consistency and compliance with GDPR and safeguarding policies.
• • Establish and socialize engineering standards: author living architecture decision records (ADRs), define naming conventions, coding standards, security baselines, and release checklists; run fortnightly guild sessions to upskill internal engineers and external vendors, fostering a culture of craftsmanship and shared ownership.
• • Champion DevOps discipline: containerize build environments, automate scratch-org provisioning, enforce code coverage gates (>85%), orchestrate blue-green or canary releases, and monitor platform health with observability dashboards (DataDog/New Relic) to guarantee 99.9 % uptime during peak enrollment and examination periods.
• • Provide hands-on administration and declarative configuration: manage user provisioning, permission sets, profiles, role hierarchies, and data-sharing models; optimize storage and performance by archiving, indexing, and leveraging big-object strategies for historical academic records.
• • Mentor and grow a distributed team of Salesforce administrators, developers, and analysts across time zones; conduct architecture reviews, pair-programming sessions, and career-path planning to cultivate a high-performing, mission-aligned engineering squad.
• • Collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders—academic operations, finance, student life, safeguarding, and external ed-tech vendors—to translate complex business requirements into elegant technical solutions that accelerate student success and institutional efficiency.
• • Safeguard data integrity and privacy: implement field-level encryption, shield-platform encryption, event-monitoring, and transaction-security policies to protect sensitive student and staff data while maintaining audit-ready documentation for regulators in Rwanda and Mauritius.
• • Experiment responsibly with AI: pilot Einstein Next Best Action, predictive lead scoring, and generative-AI tools for automated case summarization, ensuring ethical use aligned with ALU’s safeguarding and data-privacy policies.
• • Contribute to strategic technology road-mapping: evaluate emerging Salesforce products (Hyperforce, Data Cloud, Industries EDU) and adjacent cloud services, presenting ROI analyses and phased adoption plans to executive leadership.
• • Maintain a builder’s mindset: relish the ambiguity of a rapidly scaling start-up university, iterate quickly on prototypes, gather feedback from students and faculty, and pivot designs based on real-world usage rather than theoretical perfection.