Associate Technical Support Engineer - Confluent

**Introduction** At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world’s leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You’ll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM’s product and technology landscape. Here, you’ll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. **Your role and responsibilities** About the Role At Confluent, our mission is to help organizations unlock the full value of their data through real-time data streaming. Our platform powers some of the world's most critical applications, enabling businesses to make faster decisions, deliver better customer experiences, and build modern data-driven systems. As an Associate Technical Support Engineer, you'll join our EMEA Technical Support team and work alongside customers, Engineering, Product Management and Professional Services to resolve complex technical challenges. This is not a traditional support role. You'll investigate distributed systems, analyse production issues, and help customers successfully operate mission-critical Kafka environments while developing deep expertise in streaming technologies. What You'll Do In this role you will: ● Investigate and resolve technical issues across Confluent Platform and Confluent Cloud deployments. ● Work directly with enterprise customers to diagnose problems, explain findings, and guide successful resolutions. ● Collaborate closely with Engineering to identify product defects, validate fixes, and provide customer-driven feedback. ● Analyse logs, metrics, thread dumps, configuration and runtime behaviour to troubleshoot complex distributed systems. ● Improve customer and internal knowledge by contributing documentation, troubleshooting guides and knowledge base articles. ● Contribute to internal tooling and automation that improve support efficiency and customer experience. ● Participate in continuous improvement initiatives that enhance our support processes, tooling and operational excellence. **Required technical and professional expertise** ● At least two years' recent experience in software development, technical support, site reliability engineering or a similar technical role. ● Experience working with distributed systems, databases, messaging systems or data pipelines. ● Ability to read and understand Java code for troubleshooting purposes. ● Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a structured approach to technical investigations. ● Experience diagnosing technical issues in Linux environments using logs, command-line tools and system utilities. ● Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly. ● A genuine passion for learning new technologies and developing expertise in distributed streaming platforms. ● A customer-first mindset with a desire to deliver outstanding technical support. **Preferred technical and professional experience** ● Apache Kafka or other distributed messaging technologies. ● Java development. ● Public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure or Google Cloud). ● Kubernetes, Docker or containerised environments. ● Linux system administration. ● Networking fundamentals (DNS, TLS, load balancing, firewalls). ● CI/CD pipelines and software development lifecycle practices. ● SQL, data analysis or scripting (Python, Bash or similar). ● Observability platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana or OpenTelemetry. ● Experience using AI-assisted tools to improve troubleshooting, automation and knowledge management. IBM is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, caste, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, veteran status, or other characteristics. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.