Resident Solution Architect - Confluent

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 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. Required Skills Deep 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 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. 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.