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. Join us and be part of a global team that's passionate about driving innovation and making a difference. As a Solutions Architect (SA), you will help customers leverage streaming architectures and applications to achieve their mission outcomes. In this role, you will:

• Consult directly with customers to provide software architecture, design, and operations expertise that leverages your deep knowledge of and experience in Apache Kafka, the 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 a strong relationship with your customer in a very short space of time, ensuring exemplary delivery standards;
• In partnership with industry leading colleagues, have the opportunity to help customers build a state-of-the-art streaming data infrastructure, and optimize and debug customers' existing deployments. What You Will Do:
• Guide customers in developing strategies to modernize their data platforms and move toward event-driven architectures through workshops and hands-on collaboration. Such engagements often involve remote preparation, presenting onsite or remotely, investigating (with Engineering and other coworkers) solutions to difficult challenges, and writing a recommendations summary doc
• Provide feedback to the Confluent 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
• 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 your skills, building applications, or trying out new product features
• Participate in community and industry events
• Lead the hands-on implementation of production-ready deployments, guiding customer teams through the entire lifecycle from initial development to a successful production launch. 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
• 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. United States Consulting Hybrid Professional No City, US (0147) International Business Machines Corporation