Senior Customer Solution Architect

IBM; Boston (MA); Hybrid; USD 26,000 - 79,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM India Private Limited seeks a Senior Customer Solution Architect to help clients design and operate streaming data infra using Apache Kafka, Hadoop, Spark, and related tech. You will to work closely with customers to deliver architecture, guidance, and hands-on engineering leadership.

Role requires deep experience with Big Data, streaming systems, and distributed architectures, plus strong communication to translate complex concepts for diverse stakeholders.

Qualifications

• Extensive hands-on experience designing, building, and operating in-production Big Data and streaming architectures, preferably with Apache Kafka.
• Proven track record managing multiple B2B infrastructure software development projects, driving adoption and customer satisfaction.
• Experience operating Linux environments and deploying on cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Deep knowledge of JVM tuning and performance troubleshooting.
• Familiarity with distributed systems (Kafka, Hadoop, Cassandra, etc.).
• Excellent communication to translate complex technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Guide customers in platform and application strategy toward real-time, event-based solutions.
• Provide architecture, design, and operations expertise to customers.
• Develop and promote best practices and reference architectures.
• Collaborate with Product and Engineering to gather feedback.
• Write and edit technical documentation and design patterns.
• Lead technical demonstrations and workshops for customers.

Job description

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

We are looking for a Senior Solution Engineer to join our Customer Success and Professional Services team. As a Senior Solution Architect, you will help customers leverage streaming architectures and applications to achieve their business results. In this role, you will interact directly with customers to provide software architecture, design, and operations expertise that leverages your deep knowledge of and experience in Apache Kafka platform, and complementary systems such as Hadoop, Spark, Storm, relational and NoSQL databases. You will develop and advocate best practices, gather and validate critical product feedback, and help customers overcome their operational challenges. Throughout all these interactions, you will build a strong relationship with your customer in a very short space of time, ensuring exemplary delivery standards. You will also have the opportunity to help customers build state‑of‑the‑art streaming data infrastructure, in partnership with colleagues who are widely recognized as industry leaders, as well as optimizing and debugging customers’ existing deployments.

What You Will Do

• Helping a customer determine their platform and/or application strategy for moving to a more real‑time, event‑based business. Such engagements often involve remote preparation; presenting an onsite or remote workshop for the customer’s architects, developers, and operations teams; investigating (with Engineering and other coworkers) solutions to difficult challenges; and writing a recommendations summary doc.
• Providing feedback to the Product and Engineering groups
• Building 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
• Testing performance and functionality of new components developed by Engineering
• Writing or editing documentation and knowledge base articles, including reference architecture materials and design patterns based on customer experiences
• Honing your skills, building applications, or trying out new product features
• Participating in community and industry events

Required education

Bachelor’s Degree

Preferred education

Master’s Degree

Required technical and professional expertise

• 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 distributed systems (Kafka, Hadoop, Cassandra, etc.)
• Strong desire to tackle hard technical problems, and proven ability to do so with little or no direct daily supervision
• Excellent communication skills, with an ability to clearly and concisely explain tricky issues and complex solutions

..

Preferred technical and professional experience

• Ability to quickly learn new technologies
• Ability and willingness to travel up to 20% of the time to meet with customers

Years of Experience:8-15

ABOUT BUSINESS UNIT

IBM has a global presence, operating in more than 175 countries with a broad-based geographic distribution of revenue. The company’s Global Markets organization is a strategic sales business unit that manages IBM’s global footprint, working closely with dedicated country‑based operating units to serve clients locally. These country teams have client relationship managers who lead integrated teams of consultants, solution specialists and delivery professionals to enable clients’ growth and innovation. By complementing local expertise with global experience and digital capabilities, IBM builds deep and broad‑based client relationships. This local management focus fosters speed in supporting clients, addressing new markets and making investments in emerging opportunities. Additionally, the Global Markets organization serves clients with expertise in their industry as well as through the products and services that IBM and partners supply. IBM is also expanding its reach to new and existing clients through digital marketplaces.

YOUR LIFE @ IBM

In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that, dedication to our clients success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.

Being an IBMer means you’ll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you’ll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment everyday, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background.

Our IBMers are growth minded, always staying curious, open to feedback and learning new information and skills to constantly transform themselves and our company. They are trusted to provide on‑going feedback to help other IBMers grow, as well as collaborate with colleagues keeping in mind a team focused approach to include different perspectives to drive exceptional outcomes for our customers. The courage our IBMers have to make critical decisions everyday is essential to IBM becoming the catalyst for progress, always embracing challenges with resources they have to hand, a can‑do attitude and always striving for an outcome focused approach within everything that they do.

Are you ready to be an IBMer?

ABOUT IBM

IBM’s greatest invention is the IBMer. We believe that through the application of intelligence, reason and science, we can improve business, society and the human condition, bringing the power of an open hybrid cloud and AI strategy to life for our clients and partners around the world.

Restlessly reinventing since 1911, we are not only one of the largest corporate organizations in the world, we’re also one of the biggest technology and consulting employers, with many of the Fortune 500 companies relying on the IBM Cloud to run their business.

At IBM, we pride ourselves on being an early adopter of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and blockchain. Now it’s time for you to join us on our journey to being a responsible technology innovator and a force for good in the world.

IBM 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, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, or other characteristics protected by the applicable law. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.

OTHER RELEVANT JOB DETAILS

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Job Title

Senior Customer Solution Architect

Job ID

130712

City / Township / Village

State / Province

Country

India

Work arrangement

Hybrid

Area of work

Consulting

Employment type

Regular

Position type

Professional

Up to 20% or 1 day a week

Company

(0063) IBM India Private Limited

Shift

General (daytime)

Is this role a commissionable/sales incentive based position?