Senior Solution Architect - Confluent

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.

Responsibilities

• Consult directly with customers to provide software architecture, design, and operations expertise leveraging deep knowledge of Apache Kafka, Confluent’s products, and complementary systems such as Spark, Flink, Kubernetes, and relational and NoSQL databases
• Develop and advocate best practices, gather product feedback, and help customers overcome their operational challenges
• Build strong customer relationships quickly, ensuring exemplary delivery standards
• Partner with industry-leading colleagues to help customers build state-of-the-art streaming data infrastructure, and optimize and debug existing deployments
• Guide customers in developing strategies to modernize data platforms and move toward event-driven architectures through workshops and hands-on collaboration (including remote preparation, presenting onsite or remotely, investigating solutions with Engineering and coworkers, and writing recommendation summary documents)
• Provide feedback to the Confluent Product and Engineering groups
• Build tooling for other teams or the wider company to push technical boundaries and improve consistent, high-quality delivery
• Test performance and functionality of new components developed by Engineering
• Write or edit documentation and knowledge base articles, including reference architecture materials and design patterns based on customer experiences
• Hone skills by building applications or trying out new product features
• Participate in community and industry events
• Lead hands-on implementation of production-ready deployments, guiding customer teams through the entire lifecycle from initial development to successful production launch

Requirements

• Extensive experience designing, building, and operating in-production Big Data, stream processing, and/or enterprise data integration solutions, ideally using Apache Kafka
• Demonstrated experience successfully managing multiple B2B infrastructure software development projects, including driving expansion, customer satisfaction, feature adoption, and retention
• Experience operating Linux (configure, tune, and troubleshoot both RedHat and Debian-based distributions)
• Experience using cloud providers (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure) for running high-throughput systems
• Experience with Java Virtual Machine (JVM) tuning and troubleshooting
• Experience with modern distributed data systems, such as cloud data platforms (e.g., Snowflake, Databricks), container orchestration (Kubernetes, OpenShift), and other NoSQL or stream processing technologies
• Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and CI/CD tools, particularly Terraform for cloud automation and Ansible for on-premise deployments
• Proficiency in Java
• Excellent communication and consulting skills, with an ability to clearly and concisely explain tricky issues and complex solutions
• Ability and willingness to travel up to 25% of the time to meet with customers

Qualifications

• Deep Technical Specialization: Experience with technology solutions implementation and optimization, including design, development, integration, migration, and product support phases, enabling seamless delivery of technical services
• Advanced Consultative Skills: Deep expertise in problem-solving, issue-based, and hypothesis-based methodologies, allowing for the development of tailored solutions that drive true business value for clients
• Industry Thought Leadership: Deep understanding of industry best practices and standards, with the ability to advise clients on optimal technology solutions and implementation strategies, driving business growth and success