Career

AI reshapes everything. I build what's next.

Every enterprise is rearchitecting around AI. Not someday. Right now. I design the systems that make it real: production agents, grounded data pipelines, and autonomous workflows that start in Salesforce and reach every platform your business runs on.

Summary

Agentforce and Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud) architect who ships production AI that performs: 15 Data 360 engagements with ten in production, roughly 4× job placement throughput for an at-risk youth program, and AI adoption led across a 50-person practice. The platform is Salesforce; the problems span CRM, ERP, POS, loyalty systems, and legacy data across the whole enterprise. I specialize in the full stack that makes AI trustworthy: RAG grounding, federated multi-agent design, and zero-copy patterns with Snowflake and Databricks, built across two SI practices and 80+ architects enabled globally at Salesforce. Hands-on across every major Data 360 ingestion path: zero-copy on Snowflake and Databricks, structured and unstructured S3, the Streaming Ingestion API, and the CRM Connector, with Data Transforms since release (my guide to the zero copy options covers when each fits). Five of those engagements consolidated data across semi-autonomous brands, agencies, or business units.

linkedin.com/in/rhernalsteen →

Experience

Perficient Senior Solutions Architect
May 2026 – Present

Leading AI adoption and tooling for a 50-person practice while delivering Data 360 and Agentforce solutions for enterprise clients.

  • Built and maintain a Claude Code skills and prompt template library actively used across the practice, covering document generation, Marketing Cloud and Data 360 implementation patterns, and architect-facing org tooling. Getting More from Claude Code →
  • Developed an internal document-grounded product assistant: an index routes each query to the relevant Salesforce documentation, which is read to surface feature recommendations, implementation guidance, gotchas, and further reading.
  • Authoring token optimization guidance for the practice, establishing cost-aware patterns for efficient Claude usage across client engagements.
  • Building architect tooling for rapid org discovery and deployment of reusable assets into new client environments.
  • Built unified search on Data 360 behind two Agentforce agents for a network security company, with the retrieval boundary enforced by the architecture rather than by the prompt.
  • Brought revenue and operational data from Snowflake into Data 360 via zero-copy for a digital advertising platform, compared it to targets in Data Transforms, and surfaced it as Tableau Next dashboards embedded on Account pages.
  • Assessed a national field services company's Salesforce org in a single day (14,700+ fields, four platform ceilings hit on one object), then turned the Python tooling into a reusable org-audit toolkit that runs against any org from a config change.
  • Diagnosed and fixed bugs in another consultant's undocumented Data Transforms for a retail analytics company, using Claude connected to the org to recover the logic and validate each fix before proposing it.
  • Deliver end-to-end Data 360 and Agentforce solutions for enterprise clients, from scoping and architecture through go-live, including rapid proof-of-concept demos supporting active sales cycles.
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Rosetree Solutions Data Cloud Architect & Practice Lead
Mar 2025 – May 2026
Key Win

Architected a federated multi-agent Agentforce system that stood up a brand-new lead engagement function, converting leads to meetings well above the client's manual benchmark.

Lead architect for enterprise-scale Agentforce and Data 360 implementations across Retail, Manufacturing, and Automotive. Operates in high-ambiguity environments bridging legacy data silos with autonomous AI reasoning.

  • Grounded those agents with RAG on the client's product specifications, so they answered technical product questions from the source instead of guessing. How retrieval works →
  • Replaced manually curated grounding documents for a 200+ location hospitality brand with Data 360's native website sitemap ingestion, eliminating the data prep work and keeping grounding current as the site changes, with no cross-location errors in the pilot.
  • Built a single customer view across franchise brands for a multi-brand franchise operator, with identity resolution on the parent (name plus email, phone, or address) since families had no shared key across brands. How identity resolution works →
  • Delivered behavioral segmentation for a national entertainment and dining brand across Salesforce, POS, loyalty, and gaming data, federating food and gaming sales from Databricks via zero-copy and earning access to each new data set by proving value with the last. Added external weather data to market on rainy and extreme temperature days.
  • Built Claude Code skills for the company's internal repository and led sessions introducing the team to AI-assisted development workflows and what was possible with the tooling.
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Prolocity Data Cloud / Agentforce Practice Lead
Feb 2024 – Mar 2025
Key Win

Deployed Agentforce job-matching engine for a non-profit workforce program, transforming a quarterly batch process into an on-demand system with a roughly 4× increase in placement throughput and eliminating the manual data-entry paperwork. How I scope use cases like this →

Founded and led the organization's AI and Data 360 practice from zero, establishing strategy, delivery, and go-to-market.

  • Unified a constituent view in Data 360 across five autonomous agencies of a global religious denomination. Without budget for Data Spaces, designed contact eligibility by entry agency and put the cost-versus-risk trade-off to the client to decide.
  • Paused the Data 360 build for the denomination's publishing arm to fix an inconsistent CRM data model through a change order first, then integrated warehouse purchase data and Tableau. Later phases were built on the same architecture.
  • Secured acceptance into the exclusive Salesforce Agentforce Partner Network.
  • Built comprehensive Agentforce demo environment supporting cross-cloud sales, marketing, and internal enablement.
  • Presented production Agentforce and Data 360 use cases at Salesforce World Tour NYC and Salesforce Connections.
  • Co-hosted Data 360 workshops with Salesforce at Chicago Tower; designed and launched integrated Salesforce-aligned offerings for Slack and Data 360.
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Salesforce Senior Technical Architect
Feb 2022 – Feb 2024

Designed and implemented enterprise cross-cloud solutions with a focus on Data 360 (then called CDP) and Marketing Cloud for Global Retail brands. Served as cross-cloud SME and internal enablement leader.

  • Architected and led global Data 360 enablement programs for 80+ architects, directly scaling Professional Services delivery capacity. Co-ran the certification course and built Data Cloud 201, a mock project where architects ran discovery and solution design in small groups.
  • Technical architect on the Data 360 workstream of a global multi-brand retailer's zero-downtime migration off a legacy email vendor ahead of Black Friday: ingested registry and behavioral data, built calculated insights and segments for Marketing Cloud and Marketing Cloud Personalization, and led the cross-brand journey orchestration and observability. Delivered ahead of schedule and under budget, and ran without interruption through Black Friday.
  • Evaluated Data 360 for a Health & Life Sciences client. Their S3 data couldn't be reshaped on the platform at the time, so I recommended descoping that dataset rather than letting it block the program, which then went ahead.
  • Recommended a Data Spaces architecture partitioned by region and brand for a global consumer goods company, keeping regional teams out of each other's data.
  • Built a Data 360 proof of technology for a health insurer, using segmentation and calculated insights to find members under-using their benefits, using Data Transforms right after they were released.
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Coastal Cloud Senior Consultant
Nov 2020 – Feb 2022

Project/Technical Lead and Solution Architect for complex Salesforce implementations across Finance, Healthcare, Non-profit, Insurance, and Education.

  • Engineered advanced segmentation and data manipulation using SQL and SSJS; built reusable, deployable architectural components via SFMC Package Manager.
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Publicis Sapient Marketing Automation Engineer
Jan 2020 – Nov 2020

Implemented cross-cloud Salesforce solutions spanning Sales, Service, Health, Government, and Marketing Cloud for regulated and public-sector clients.

  • Executed large-scale audience segmentation via SQL Query Activities and delivered web and email personalization across multiple concurrent client engagements.
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Hagerty Software Developer → Solution Architect
Aug 2013 – Jan 2020

Six years at a specialty insurance and automotive enthusiast brand, progressing from core systems development into enterprise Salesforce architecture and agile delivery leadership.

  • Administered enterprise Marketing Cloud account including campaign execution, content personalization, and segmentation of 1MM+ customer datasets using SQL Query Activities.
  • Supported nightly ETL and population of a SQL Server data warehouse with 5MM+ customer, policy, and vehicle records; led migration of 3MM+ records into Salesforce.
  • Led SAFe certification courses for 100+ Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and Executive Leadership; coached non-IT teams on Lean-Agile practices.
  • Owned source code repository, build pipelines, test environments, and production releases for core systems exceeding 2 million lines of code across a mixed on-prem/cloud landscape.
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R.L. Polk & Co. IT Programmer / Analyst
Jun 2005 – Aug 2013

Led development and support for global automated marketing programs across US and European teams. Replaced a legacy mainframe application with a new Oracle data mart, reducing vehicle population data delivery time from 5 months to 1 month.

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Salesforce Certifications

AI & Data
Agentforce Specialist Data 360 Consultant Platform Data Architect
Marketing Cloud
Engagement Consultant Engagement Developer Engagement Administrator Engagement Specialist Account Engagement Consultant Account Engagement Specialist
Platform
Agentforce Service Consultant Agentforce Sales Consultant Platform Administrator Platform App Builder Slack Administrator

Education

Northern Michigan University B.S., Computer Information Systems
1999 – 2003