Senior Solutions Engineering Manager - Confluent - LATAM

Introduction 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. Your Role and Responsibilities As Senior Solutions Engineering Manager for LATAM, you will lead and scale the Solutions Engineering organization across a diverse, multi-country region. You will set regional technical strategy, develop high-performing leaders and teams, and partner closely with Sales and cross-functional executives to help customers realize value from Confluent's data streaming platform. You will bring a regional perspective to customer engagement, talent development, go-to-market planning, and resource allocation. Working across markets, languages, cultures, and customer requirements, you will raise the quality and consistency of technical engagements while adapting execution to local needs. The role combines organizational leadership with active involvement in strategic customer and business priorities. What you'll do * Lead, coach, and develop Solutions Engineering teams and leaders across LATAM; build an inclusive culture of accountability, learning, and strong customer outcomes. * Set the regional Solutions Engineering strategy in partnership with Sales leadership, aligning technical coverage and priorities to business plans, growth opportunities, and customer needs. * Contribute to regional planning, pipeline reviews, forecasting, territory and account strategy, and capacity planning; identify coverage gaps and recommend clear actions. * Provide executive-level leadership for strategic customer engagements, helping teams connect business priorities to credible, secure, and scalable architectures. * Guide the organization's approach to discovery, architecture, demonstrations, technical validation, and evaluation success criteria, maintaining high standards while enabling market-specific execution. * Build strong relationships with customer executives, technical leaders, partners, and internal stakeholders; represent customer needs and regional insights to global teams. * Partner with Sales, Customer Success, Product, Engineering, Marketing, and partner organizations to deliver coordinated customer experiences and support adoption. * Translate customer feedback, competitive dynamics, and market patterns across LATAM into actionable recommendations for product and go-to-market leaders. * Develop talent and succession plans, support hiring and onboarding, and create career pathways and leadership opportunities across the region. * Establish operating mechanisms for team performance, knowledge sharing, engagement quality, resource prioritization, and consistent execution across countries. * Represent the Solutions Engineering organization in regional leadership forums and contribute to broader company initiatives. * Maintain strategic technical fluency in data streaming, Apache Kafka, cloud and hybrid architectures, and the needs of enterprise customers in LATAM. Required Skills Significant experience in Solutions Engineering, Sales Engineering, or a related customer-facing technical organization, including substantial people-leadership experience. A track record of leading teams across multiple countries, markets, or geographies and delivering results through leaders and cross-functional partners. Experience partnering with Sales leadership on regional strategy, account coverage, pipeline execution, resource planning, and business outcomes. Strong executive presence and the ability to build credibility with senior customer stakeholders while guiding complex technical and organizational decisions. Technical fluency in distributed systems, data infrastructure, cloud platforms, and modern application architectures. Familiarity with Apache Kafka, event-driven architecture, or data streaming concepts or the ability to quickly develop and communicate deep expertise in these areas. Ability to help teams translate customer objectives into practical architectures and effective discovery, demonstration, and technical evaluation plans. Strong communication, coaching, organizational, and change-leadership skills, with sound judgment across different market contexts. Ability to travel within LATAM and, as needed, to other company locations or customer sites. Preferred Skills Experience building or scaling technical field organizations in Latin America. Professional working proficiency in Spanish and/or Portuguese, in addition to English; exact language expectations should reflect the assigned markets. Experience supporting enterprise customers across cloud, hybrid, and self-managed environments. Familiarity with data integration, stream processing, governance, security, and mission-critical workloads. Experience serving customers in regulated industries or complex public-sector environments. Additional Details (US) IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to: - Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being - Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs - Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law - Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals - Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year. This position is eligible for participation in an IBM Sales Incentive plan. Actual incentive opportunity will be based on performance and the eligible Target Incentive, as addressed in the applicable plan, all of which is subject to change. The compensation range listed for this position is the IBM Reference Salary that is used when you are not actively participating in a sales plan. Your actual base pay plus incentive opportunity will be determined by the Incentive Plan assigned to you. IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.