Salesforce Is “Aggressively Hiring” in These Areas: What to Watch Out For

When Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff announced last year that the cloud giant would no longer be hiring software engineers, it sent a wave of confusion through the entire tech ecosystem. Couple that with recent layoffs in favor of shifting full steam ahead with Agentforce, and suddenly the current and future state of the market doesn’t seem so clear. 

So, what areas are Salesforce hiring in, and what areas should professionals try their luck somewhere else in? 

Hiring “Aggressively” for 2025

In a recent podcast from Pioneers of AI, Marc Benioff spoke about how Agentforce would impact the future of the world of work, including how Agentforce’s “digital labor” efforts are likely to play out in the future.

Benioff explained how Salesforce is already rebalancing its workforce, hiring in some areas like sales and then cutting in others, like customer support. 

“I’m still hiring very aggressively right now to expand my customer organization by 10-20% this year,” he said. “I’m still focused on growing many functions, but there are some areas where I’m not expanding.”

“For example, in engineering, I’ve achieved higher productivity, so I’m maintaining a flat headcount. When it comes to customer support, I’m reducing headcount because I don’t need as many support agents. This allows me to rebalance and shift priorities.”

This is not something that is particularly groundbreaking; the ecosystem has heard this before. As aforementioned, at the end of last year, Benioff spoke up on the future of software engineers at Salesforce, and when February’s layoffs occurred, Bloomberg reported that a reason behind them was to focus more on hiring people to sell Agentforce.

What does this mean for the job market, though, for both newcomers and seasoned professionals? 

Who Is Salesforce Actively Hiring For?

So, Marc Benioff has said that engineering jobs and customer service jobs are not focus areas for hiring this year, but that sales is an area that is. How does this match the kinds of jobs that Salesforce is actively hiring for, though? 

At the time of writing, Salesforce is hiring for this many positions in these key areas:

• 186 Customer Success positions
• 653 Sales positions
• 106 Software Engineering positions 

These are from Salesforce’s official careers site and are segmented by team. If we break this down further, some of the most popular positions worldwide include the following:

Note: These positions were found using these specific search terms on Salesforce’s career site using quotation marks for accuracy. The disparity between these results and the ‘Team’ results is likely due to differences in job descriptions.

What Does This Data Tell Us?

One of the most notable observations to be made here is that Salesforce is indeed hiring far fewer customer success positions than sales positions, as Benioff confirmed. Account Executives make up a prominent proportion of this area, and it’s easy to see why; with Salesforce eager to secure as many successful Agentforce deals as possible, AEs are a critical part of that mission.

Another interesting observation is the number of positions available in engineering. 106 positions are listed in the ‘Engineering Team’, but if you search for ‘Solution Engineer’, 180 positions come up, and if you search for ‘Software Engineer’, 189 positions come up. 

It must be said that the system is likely matching positions to keywords, so not all positions may be directly applicable, but the number of positions is not exceptionally low, and certainly more than Benioff claimed last year.

What About AI Positions?

Of course, an area that many professionals and analysts alike have been paying attention to lately is AI jobs, and at the time of writing, Salesforce currently has 424 positions available under the search term ‘AI’.

Note: The search term ‘AI’ has been used here instead of ‘artificial intelligence’ as the former is what Salesforce uses in their titles and job descriptions. 

The AI positions available range and cover multiple teams, including Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Research Scientist, Technical AI Architect, and Senior AI Technical Consultant.  

A key observation here is that 14 out of 20 positions on the first page of this search term are engineering positions, and there are 48 available AI positions in the Software Engineering team. 

Where Are These Jobs?

If we were to look at the positions available in the Customer Success, Sales, and Software Engineering teams specifically, the 921 positions can be broken down by region accordingly, with the remaining 36 jobs available in other regions:

Perhaps interestingly, most positions within these three teams are in the U.S., predominantly in San Francisco, California, and Bellevue, Washington. The U.S. also has the most software engineering positions available out of these regions, followed only semi-closely by India, but it still has 3x fewer positions available than the U.S. 

The UK, the U.S., and Japan share similar numbers of open sales positions, indicating a dedication to Salesforce’s global business strategy and balanced market opportunities. 

Final Thoughts

Taking a look at this snapshot of some of Salesforce’s active hiring processes gives professionals an idea of where Salesforce’s official hiring goals lie and how it can impact them depending on their region of work, profession, and experience. 

It is evident that Marc Benioff’s statement of hiring no software engineers isn’t entirely true, which you can argue is to be expected, but putting actual numbers against this claim goes a long way to illustrate the current state of that market sector. 

It’s clear to see that factors such as offshoring, market expansion, and a dedication to selling Agentforce are all key factors impacting the Salesforce job market at present, and as Salesforce’s hiring strategy evolves, it will be interesting to see how focuses shift and whether the partner and ISV market follow suit.