Engineering the Future at Salesforce

Today, Software Engineer Chelsea Davis spends her days developing a scoring method for customer satisfaction using machine learning. But, back in 2021, when Chelsea read the job description for the engineering role at Salesforce — she wondered if she even had the skillset to apply.

While she met the majority of the criteria — with several years of tech consulting, an MBA, and certifications — there were a few preferred experiences that weren’t a perfect match to her resume.

Did she shy away from the opportunity? No. Chelsea saw herself as a Trailblazer, and knew that her strength was in her ability to learn new things. She submitted her resume— and got the job.

We sat down with Chelsea to learn more about her experience in the role, including her latest AI projects.

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Tell us about your role as a Software Engineer with a specific focus on data engineering. What does your day-to-day look like?

As a Software Engineer and a Scrum lead on the data team, I do a lot of the code reviews for my peers — maintaining quality of the code — and with that comes lots of documentation on our coding and data projects to prepare knowledge transfers. We also work together to solve problems, debug, and fix code when it breaks — because it inevitably will. There’s a lot of collaboration!

What’s a project you’re working on that excites you?

Right now I am developing the sentiment analysis scoring method for our overall customer satisfaction using machine learning. 

Every single customer can give us feedback on our products and services at any time, and it’s my job — and my team’s job — to make sure we understand the feedback and then take action to make the experience better.

We’re using Natural Language Processing tools to digest thousands of data points much faster than humans can, and are building the categorization of overall scoring as positive, negative, or neutral.

From there, we’re creating a dashboard that will sort, summarize, and disseminate actionable insights using Generative AI so we know which improvement to focus on next.

I’m really excited to be working with such innovative AI technology and learning something new. This project will help us deliver better products to our customers, and I love that my work will directly impact that experience.

What led you to becoming a Software Engineer?

I've always been a forward-thinking person. When I got to college I asked myself: What's going to be around in the next 10 or 20 years? Technology came to mind because it’s always evolving, always changing, and requires constant learning. So I completed a Bachelor's degree in Management Information Systems.

I took a lot of coding courses during those years. In the beginning, I didn’t love coding — it wasn’t something I could see myself spending hours on every day. But what I loved was problem solving — it’s a sense of gratification every time I fix something!

Luckily, software engineering doesn’t have to be only about coding; I found my place on the data analytics side of the house. I am passionate about making data useful, and I can understand and articulate it to make things better. Companies have millions of pieces of data, and every bit of it is an asset — we have to make sure that data is not only used in the most optimal way, but also that it is secure and accurate.

What do you like most about your role?

The continuous learning path is what I love most about this job. I'm gaining so many skills and working with technologies that I had no previous experience with, like Oracle and Snowflake. And, this whole AI revolution has taught me so much about the possibilities of technology. It’s amazing what I can learn from the different projects I work on, how I am really encouraged to be innovative, and how I can raise my hand to say “Hey, this can be better if we automate it.” Plus, I get to help our customers be more successful with these technologies, too!

My team is very supportive and many are more senior than I am, so picking their brains has also been amazing for my growth. We’re all excited to help each other, and there’s definitely an open-door policy to our leaders that I’ve never experienced before. The diverse backgrounds and perspectives on my team, and within the company, have been a great way for me to learn from my peers in a really unique way.

Salesforce provides a plethora of formal resources too: I just signed up for trainings to learn more about Airflow and Python. There are endless possibilities here to learn and try new things, so I'm excited for my future!

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