Customer Success Technical Architect

**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** Confluent is searching for a Customer Success Technical Architect (CSTA) to act as a trusted technical advisor and advocate to work with our customers. The primary objective of this role is to ensure the success, retention & expansion of our customers by providing technical guidance, including best practices, for the Confluent product suite. You will partner with others in Customer Solutions as well as cross-functional divisions such as Sales, Product Management and Engineering to help our customers accelerate time to value, maximize product consumption and achieve their overall business objectives. The CSTA role is both deeply technical and commercial in nature. You will leverage a technical background (e.g. AppDev, SysAdmin, Distributed Computing) to advise customers on their architectures, including patterns & strategies for operating and maturing their Confluent subscription. You will also utilize relationship management skills & industry experience to guide the customer on how they can best achieve their business goals and value-based outcomes via their Confluent investment. In this role, you will have the opportunity to build broad experience with Kafka, Flink and Confluent IP as well as gain an understanding of complementary and competitive technologies. You will work with a variety of organizations ranging from new start-ups to large enterprise customers. Throughout these interactions, you will build strong relationships, ensure exemplary delivery standards, and have a lot of fun helping our customers build state-of-the-art data streaming platforms! As a CSTA At Confluent, You Can Expect To * Champion and advocate for the customer within Confluent. You will be the technical voice of the customer and will leverage learned technical insights & perspective while coordinating between Confluent Sales, Product, Services, Support and Training teams to drive technical success. * Identify customer technical objections and develop strategies to address those blockers to adoption. * Proactively support customers through technical lifecycle activities such as architecture planning, cluster & security design, monitoring & automation; review & provide guidance on upgrade or migration plans, platform & application hardening ideas and high availability design. * Guide customers up the data streaming maturity curve through recommendations on advanced technical topics (e.g. data mesh, stream processing, utilization optimization & performance tuning) * Develop and present periodic customer reviews, including analysis of technical health and operational performance, to Confluent senior management. * Document and transfer knowledge to customers and internal teams. This assists customers in advancing their knowledge & abilities on their own, while also helping Technical Support Engineers and Professional Services teams better serve your customers. * Leverage knowledge of your customer environments and use cases to influence the roadmap of Confluent products. * When necessary, roll up your sleeves and dig in to help address customer issues alongside Confluent Technical Support Engineers and Core Engineering. **Required technical and professional expertise** * Demonstrated success in a technical Field role for a product / SaaS company with enterprise customers * Passion for working on complex technical problems, with a strong understanding of modern infrastructure and streaming technologies; self-starter who loves a fast-paced environment * Excellent interpersonal & communication skills and an ability to concisely explain tricky issues and complex solutions to a variety of personas * Demonstrated ability to manage multiple customers at a time while paying strict attention to detail and delivering results across multiple initiatives such as driving expansion, customer satisfaction, feature adoption, and retention * Hands on knowledge of one or more key cloud vendors (AWS, GCP and Azure) * Solid understanding of cloud networking and security technologies (e.g. VPC, Private Link, Private Service Connect, TLS/SSL, SASL, Kerberos, etc.) * Experience prototyping and analyzing code for client solutions in multiple languages (e.g. Java, Python, Go, etc.) * Experience with Java Virtual Machine (JVM) tuning and troubleshooting * Experience with operating Linux, you know how to configure, tune and troubleshoot both RedHat & Debian based distributions * Ability to learn new technologies quickly, as well as a strong interest in doing so! * Flexibility to travel up to 20% of the time **Preferred technical and professional experience** Confluent Developer or Administrator certifications (https://www.confluent.io/certification/) * Experience with Apache Kafka & Apache Flink * Experience helping customers build distributed systems or streaming solutions that use Apache Kafka alongside technologies such as Spark, Flink, Hadoop, Cassandra, etc * Fluency in English and Italian 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.