Senior Customer Success Technical Architect- Confluent

Role Overview

The Customer Success Technical Architect (CSTA) role at Confluent involves acting as a trusted technical advisor and advocate to work with customers. The primary objective is to ensure the success, retention, and expansion of our customers by providing technical guidance, including best practices, for the Confluent product suite. This role requires a deep understanding of technical aspects and a strong ability to communicate effectively with customers.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical guidance and advice to customers on their architectures, including patterns and strategies for operating and maturing their Confluent subscription.
• Partner with other teams such as Sales, Product Management, and Engineering to help customers accelerate time to value, maximize product consumption, and achieve their business objectives.
• Identify and address customer technical objections and develop strategies to overcome adoption barriers.
• Support customers through various technical lifecycle activities such as architecture planning, cluster and security design, monitoring, and automation.
• Review and provide guidance on upgrade or migration plans, platform and application hardening ideas, and high availability design.
• Guide customers up the data streaming maturity curve through recommendations on advanced technical topics like data mesh, stream processing, utilization optimization, and performance tuning.
• Document and transfer knowledge to customers and internal teams to assist them in advancing their knowledge and abilities.
• Leverage knowledge of customer environments and use cases to influence the roadmap of Confluent products.
• When necessary, roll up your sleeves and help address customer issues alongside Confluent Technical Support Engineers and Core Engineering teams.

Requirements

• Demonstrated success in a technical field role for a product or SaaS company with enterprise customers.
• A passion for working on complex technical problems, with a strong understanding of modern infrastructure and streaming technologies.
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills, with the ability to explain tricky issues and complex solutions to a variety of personas.
• Able to manage multiple customers at a time while paying strict attention to detail and delivering results across multiple initiatives such as driving expansion, customer satisfaction, feature adoption, and retention.
• A collaborative spirit, outstanding consulting and relationship management skills, and the ability to rapidly switch context.
• Hands-on knowledge of one or more key cloud vendors (AWS, GCP, and Azure).
• A solid understanding of cloud networking and security technologies (e.g., VPC, Private Link, Private Service Connect, TLS/SSL, SASL, Kerberos, etc.).
• Experience prototyping and analyzing code for client solutions in multiple languages (e.g., Java, Python, Go, etc.).
• Experience with Java Virtual Machine (JVM) tuning and troubleshooting.
• Ability to configure, tune, and troubleshoot both RedHat and Debian-based distributions.
• Able to learn new technologies quickly and maintain a strong interest in doing so.

Preferred Technical and Professional Experience

• Confluent Developer or Administrator certifications.
• Experience with Apache Kafka and Apache Flink.
• Experience helping customers build distributed systems or streaming solutions that use Apache Kafka alongside technologies such as Spark, Flink, Hadoop, Cassandra, etc.
• Emerging technologies knowledge: staying up-to-date on industry trends, market dynamics, and key players, with the ability to identify and capitalize on emerging opportunities.
• Strategic thinking: developing industry insights and solutions that drive business value and address pressing industry challenges, with the ability to think strategically and tailor guidance to client needs.