The posting
At IBM Global Sales, we bring together innovation, collaboration, and expertise to help clients solve their most complex business challenges. Working across industries and geographies, you'll partner with colleagues, clients, and partners to co-create solutions that drive digital transformation and lasting impact.Success in Global Sales is built on curiosity, empathy, and collaboration. You'll connect technical understanding with strong people skills, building trusted relationships and shaping solutions that improve business and society. With world-class onboarding, continuous learning, and a supportive culture, IBM offers the tools and opportunities to grow your career. Join us and be part of a global team that's passionate about driving innovation and making a difference.
We’re looking for a Solutions Architect to join our Customer Success team. As a Solutions Architect (SA), you’ll help customers use streaming architectures and applications to achieve their business goals. You’ll work directly with customers, drawing on your expertise in software architecture, distributed systems design, and operations, as well as your deep knowledge of Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, the Confluent platform, and complementary systems. You’ll develop and advocate for best practices, gather and validate critical product feedback, and help customers overcome operational challenges.
Throughout these engagements, you’ll build strong customer relationships quickly and deliver an exemplary customer experience. You’ll also help customers build state-of-the-art streaming data infrastructure in partnership with colleagues recognized as industry leaders.
What You Will Do
- Help customers define their platform and/or application strategy as they move toward a more real-time, event-driven business.
- Prepare for and lead onsite or remote workshops for customer architects, developers, and operations teams. Investigate solutions for complex challenges and write summaries with your recommendations.
- Provide feedback to the Product and Engineering groups
- Build tooling for another team or the wider company to help us push our technical boundaries and improve our ability to deliver consistently with high quality
- Continue developing your skills by building applications, exploring new product features, and participating in community and industry events.
You’ll need strong technical skills and industry experience to work with some of the world’s leading companies and sharpest minds. Credibility is key. We don’t expect you to be a Kafka expert when you join Confluent, but we do look for a track record of meaningful achievements and strong technical skills in similar technology stacks.
- Expertise in distributed systems design, with deep experience designing, building, and operating production Big Data, stream-processing, and/or enterprise data integration solutions. Ideally, you’ve worked with Apache Kafka alongside relational and NoSQL databases, message queues, and related products.
- A track record of successfully delivering multiple software infrastructure projects, including driving expansion, customer satisfaction, feature adoption, and retention.
- The ability to lead high-level system design discussions and reviews while drawing on strong operational expertise to explain and champion industry best practices.
- Programming skills that enable you to understand code quickly and write software to a reasonable level of competence in Java, Python, Go, or similar languages.
- Expert-level Java proficiency and experience with JVM tuning and troubleshooting are a plus.
- Experience with cloud providers and secure cloud networking designs for high-throughput systems, including AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure.
- Extensive experience in customer-facing roles, with excellent interpersonal and communication skills. You can clearly and concisely explain complex issues and solutions to a range of audiences, including engineers, enterprise architects, and engineering managers.
- A strong desire to learn. You’ll need to stay up to date on Confluent’s products and be in touch with the broader ecosystem of software our customers use. Ideal candidates are curious about technology, pursue self-directed learning, and make use of company-provided resources.
- Experience operating Linux-based environments, including installing applications and configuring, tuning, and troubleshooting Red Hat and Debian-based distributions and the applications that run on them.
- A strong desire to tackle difficult technical problems, with the ability to do so with little or no day-to-day supervision.
- The ability to set clear boundaries and expectations with customers.
- Be a team player, leveraging the strengths of your teammates and working with internal stakeholders to maximize customer success.
About the team Love technology and care about customers? We do, too. The Customer Success team is made up of smart people who are passionate about helping customers realize business value from Confluent software. We help customers architect the right solutions, understand the technology, and resolve issues. We’re technology enthusiasts who care deeply about our customers and get to work with exciting software and some of the world’s biggest and most innovative companies.
NA
