Staff Customer Success Technical Architect- Confluent

IBM; United States; Remote; USD 151,000 - 281,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare benefits

401(k) plan

Paid time off

Training resources

Job summary

IBM Global Sales is seeking a Staff Customer Success Technical Architect to act as a trusted technical advisor, guiding customers through architecture design, security considerations, and data streaming strategies. You will partner with Sales, Product, and Engineering to accelerate value realization across Confluent deployments.

The role blends deep technical execution with business outcomes, requiring cloud and streaming ecosystem expertise, strong communication, and travel up to 20%.

Qualifications

• Technical Field role experience with enterprise customers.
• Strong infrastructure and streaming tech understanding.
• Excellent interpersonal & communication skills.
• Ability to manage multiple customers and drive expansion/retention.
• Collaborative consulting and relationship management skills.
• Hands-on knowledge of one or more cloud vendors (AWS, GCP and Azure).
• Cloud networking and security knowledge (VPC, Private Link, Private Service Connect, TLS/SSL, SASL, Kerberos).
• Experience prototyping and analyzing code (Java, Python, Go).
• Experience with JVM tuning.
• Experience with Linux (RedHat & Debian).
• Willingness to travel up to 20%.

Responsibilities

• Champion the customer within Confluent; be the technical voice and coordinate with Sales, Product, Services, Support and Training.
• Identify customer technical objections and develop strategies to address blockers to adoption.
• Support customers through architecture planning, cluster & security design, monitoring & automation; review upgrade or migration plans and high-availability design.
• Guide customers on data streaming maturity and advanced topics (data mesh, stream processing, utilization optimization).
• Develop and present periodic customer reviews with technical health and operational performance analyses.
• Document and transfer knowledge to customers and internal teams; support engineers and services teams.
• Influence the roadmap of Confluent products based on customer environments and use cases.
• Collaborate to address issues with Confluent Support Engineers and Core Engineering when needed.

Skills

Staff-level experience

Cloud platforms

Java

Python

Go

Linux

JVM tuning

Kafka

Flink

Security concepts

Architecture guidance

Customer relationships

Education

High School Diploma/GED

Bachelor's Degree

Tools

Kafka tooling

Monitoring tooling

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,andcollaboration.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 Staff 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 Staff 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! Locations: US Remote

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 education

High School Diploma/GED

Preferred education

Bachelor's Degree

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
• Collaborative spirit, outstanding consulting & relationship management skills and ability to rapidly switch context
• 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

• 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

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. 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.

Projected Minimum Salary per year 151,000.00

Projected Maximum Salary per year 281,000.00

Work arrangement Remote

Area of work Consulting

Employment type Regular

Contract type Regular

Position type Professional

Up to 20% or 1 day a week

Company (0147) International Business Machines Corporation

Shift General (daytime)

Is this role a commissionable/sales incentive based position?

City / Township / Village No City

State / Province Illinois, Ohio, Texas, New York, North Carolina, Virginia, Washington, Massachusetts, Nevada, California, New Jersey, District of Columbia

Country United States