Senior Technical Marketing Manager (TMM)- Confluent

IBM; United States; Remote; USD 110,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare benefits

Paid time off

Job summary

IBM Global Sales seeks a Senior Technical Marketing Manager to drive adoption of Confluent-based data streaming platforms. You will craft technical narratives, build demos, and create compelling content for developers, architects, data engineers, and execs.

You’ll collaborate with product marketing, product management, engineering, and field teams to scale Streamhouse narratives and proof points, enabling real-time AI and analytics across industries.

Qualifications

• Hands-on streaming and data experience.
• 5+ years with streaming/data technologies (Kafka, Flink, Spark Structured Streaming).
• Strong understanding of distributed systems and event-driven architectures.
• Solid software engineering skills with production-ready code samples.
• Proficiency in at least one programming language (Java/Python) and SQL.

Responsibilities

• Build flagship demos and solutions showcasing Confluent tech.
• Create technical content (blogs, whitepapers, demos, labs).
• Develop reference architectures and proof points for Streamhouse.
• Collaborate with marketing, product and field teams on launches and campaigns.
• Deliver live and virtual workshops, labs, webinars, and talks.

Skills

Streaming data

Kafka/Flink

Kubernetes

Docker

Technical storytelling

Cross-functional collaboration

Production-grade code

SQL

Customer-focused

Education

Bachelor's Degree

Tools

Confluent Platform

Apache Kafka

Apache Flink

Iceberg

Terraform

Job description

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

With Confluent, an IBM Company, organizations harness continuously flowing data to innovate and win in the modern digital world. We are defining a new category within data infrastructure — Streamhouse — so every organization can build real time experiences and use the power of data in ways that profoundly change how we all live and work.

One Confluent. One team. One Data Streaming Platform. Data connects us.

About the role

We are looking for a Senior Technical Marketing Manager (TMM) with strong software and data engineering foundations to drive adoption and awareness of Confluent among technical audiences, including developers, architects, data engineers, and technical executives. You will help turn bottom-up developer adoption into enterprise growth.

You will turn Confluent capabilities into clear, compelling technical stories, demos, and assets that show how Confluent solves real customer problems, including real-time AI and agentic use cases. You’ll collaborate closely with Product Marketing, Product Management, Engineering, Developer Relations, and the Field to build and scale a world class library of technical content and demos.

You will help define and tell the story of Streamhouse, the emerging data architecture category in which applications and AI agents act on fresh, governed, real time business context.

What you will do

• Build flagship demos and solutions
• Design and implement realistic, reusable demos and reference solutions that showcase Confluent’s Data Streaming Platform (Kafka, Flink, Iceberg, connectors, governance, security and access control, AI/ML and AI agent use cases).
• Operationalize these demos so they are reproducible, documented, and easy for others to run (field, partners, and customers).
• Create technical content that tells a story
• Author high quality technical content (blogs, whitepapers, reference architectures, lab guides, how to videos, webinars) that explains why and how to use Confluent to solve specific problems and use cases.
• Translate complex distributed systems concepts, such as exactly once semantics and event driven architecture, into clear narratives that connect architecture to business outcomes for audiences from engineers to CTOs and CFOs.
• Develop Streamhouse messaging, reference architectures, and proof points that show how Confluent’s Data Streaming Platform captures, processes, governs, and serves real time context to production applications and AI agents.
• Partner on launches, campaigns, and use cases
• Collaborate with Product Marketing and Product Management on launches and campaigns: define the technical story, proof points, and required assets.
• Develop content around priority use cases (e.g., real time analytics, app modernization, real time AI and AI/ML pipelines, data warehouse offload) and key industries such as financial services and e commerce.
• Measure the impact of your work through adoption, usage, and pipeline influence, and iterate based on what the data shows.
• Show up as a technical expert in the field
• Deliver live and virtual workshops, hands on labs, webinars, and conference talks that demonstrate Confluent in action.
• Support strategic customer and partner conversations with demos, architectural deep dives, and technical validation.
• Enable the sales and field teams with technical training, demo kits, and playbooks that help them win deals.
• Represent Confluent in briefings with industry analysts and technical influencers.
• Drive technical proof and competitive clarity
• Build and maintain benchmarks, comparisons, and technical proof points that articulate Confluent’s differentiation vs. alternatives (self managed Kafka, CSP native services, other stream processing platforms).
• Create competitive battlecards and objection handling guidance, and contribute to win/loss analysis, from a practitioner’s perspective.
• Feed insights back into the product
• Act as the voice of the practitioner: synthesize feedback from demos, events, customers, and the field to identify product gaps and improvements.
• Partner with Product Management to prioritize developer and operator needs on the roadmap.

Required education

Bachelor's Degree

Required technical and professional expertise

• Hands on streaming and data experience
• 5+ years working with streaming/data technologies such as Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, Kafka Streams, Spark Structured Streaming, or similar.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, event driven architectures, and cloud native architectures.
• Solid software engineering skills
• Proficiency in at least one modern programming language (e.g., Java, Python) and strong SQL skills, with comfort writing production quality code, samples, and utilities.
• 5+ years of hands on experience with Kubernetes (K8s), plus Docker and other container platforms, for deploying and managing applications.
• Technical storytelling and content skills
• Demonstrated ability to create clear, accurate, and engaging technical content (blogs, talks, demos, labs, docs, or workshops).
• Talent for simplifying complex concepts without losing the important details, for both practitioner and executive audiences.
• Customer and field orientation
• Experience working directly with customers, sales, or solution teams (e.g., as a technical marketer, solutions architect, developer advocate, or sales engineer).
• Comfort gathering requirements, understanding real world constraints, and tailoring solutions and content accordingly.
• Collaboration and ownership
• Track record of end to end ownership: from idea → prototype → content → launch → iteration.
• Ability to work cross functionally across Product, Marketing, Engineering, and Field teams, balancing multiple stakeholders while keeping the practitioner and customer at the center.
• Self directed, comfortable managing multiple workstreams and making decisions without perfect information.

Preferred technical and professional experience

• Deep hands on experience with Confluent Cloud, Confluent Platform, and/or Apache Kafka at scale.
• Experience with Apache Flink (DataStream or Table/SQL APIs) or other stream processing engines in production.
• Familiarity with real time AI, AI agents, and agentic workflows built on streaming data (RAG pipelines, feature streams, context engineering, streaming ETL into vector/warehouse systems).
• Familiarity with open table and lakehouse formats such as Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, and Apache Paimon.
• Experience creating and delivering hands on workshops (e.g., using Terraform, cloud labs, or self service environments).Experience building competitive battlecards or sales enablement that improved win rates.
• Familiarity with the Streamhouse architecture and with building real time context for AI agents and production applications on streaming data.
• Prior experience in Technical Marketing, Developer Relations, or Product Marketing at an infrastructure or data platform company.

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

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.

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.

The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. 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.