Senior Sales Engineer (m/f/d)

About the role

We are seeking a Sales Engineer who combines strong technical acumen with business awareness. As the technical counterpart in every customer conversation, you will connect customer problems to our platform capabilities and translate technical value into business impact. You will work closely with Sales, Product, Customer Success, Marketing, and Engineering to help organizations understand, evaluate, and adopt Ververica, the unified streaming data platform that powers real-time decisioning for customers in finance, gaming, telco, and manufacturing.

Responsibilities

• Run technical discovery to identify customer pain points, current-state architecture, and desired outcomes.
• Design tailored streaming architectures and solutions that map Ververica's platform to the customer's data landscape.
• Deliver product demos and lead proofs of concept that prove real, measurable value.
• Provide the technical validation that supports the deal and earns customer trust, from first call through to close.
• Own the technical narrative in RFPs, security and architecture reviews, and executive briefings.
• Act as the voice of the customer to Product and Engineering, feeding field insight back into the roadmap.
• Build reusable demo assets, reference architectures, and enablement material that scale beyond a single deal.
• Partner with Customer Success to ensure a clean handover and a successful path to production.
• Represent Ververica in the Apache Flink community and at industry events, meetups, and webinars.
• Stay current on the streaming, data, and AI landscape, and apply that knowledge to sharpen how we position the platform.

Requirements

Basic Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience in a Sales Engineering, Solutions Architecture, Solutions Engineering, or comparable customer-facing technical role.
• Hands-on familiarity with data systems: streaming architectures, distributed data processing, data pipelines, or analytics platforms.
• Working knowledge of at least one major cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and of deployment models including on-premises and BYOC.
• Ability to communicate clearly and credibly with both engineers and executives, adjusting depth to the audience.
• Proficiency in SQL, and comfort reading or writing code in at least one language such as Java, Scala, Python, or SQL-based streaming dialects.
• Experience scoping and running proofs of concept against customer success criteria.
• Demonstrated ability to take initiative, seek clarity, and make things happen with limited supervision.
• Willingness to travel to customers and events as needed.

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with Apache Flink, Apache Kafka, or comparable stream processing and event streaming technologies.
• Knowledge of containerization (Docker) and orchestration tools (Kubernetes).
• Experience selling or implementing open-source or open-core software, and comfort working with technical communities.
• Exposure to real-time AI and machine learning use cases, including feature pipelines and streaming inference.
• Domain experience in financial services, gaming, telecommunications, or manufacturing.
• Experience with data warehouses and lakehouse architectures, and with the ecosystem around them.

Benefits

At Ververica, you will help shape the future of real-time data processing. Founded in 2014 by the original creators of Apache Flink and backed by Alibaba Group since 2019, we combine deep open-source roots with the pace of a scaling company. You will join a remote-first, global, and tech-first team where your technical judgment directly shapes how customers adopt streaming, and where real-time meets the next wave of AI.