Advisory Solutions Engineer

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

As an Advisory Solutions Engineer at Confluent, you will operate as a strategic technical leader in the pre- and post-sales cycle, driving the design, architecture, and adoption of Confluents’ Data Streaming Platform across our most strategic enterprise customers.

This role balances cross-functional leadership, deep technical expertise, and strategic influence.

You will collaborate closely with sales, product, engineering, and customer success teams to drive complex solution design, influence roadmap decisions, and help customers derive tangible business value from Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform.

You will not only lead engagements, but also mentor others, establish best practices, and help scale the impact of the broader Solutions Engineering team.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead comprehensive technical discovery sessions with high-value prospects to meticulously uncover what the customer is solving for and, crucially, the Why.
• Architect scalable, resilient, and tailored event streaming platforms using Confluent Cloud/Platform, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, and Flink SQL - plus IBM Data & AI solutions
• Partner with Product and Engineering teams to translate customer feedback into product roadmap insights and feature requests.
• Lead advanced Proof-of-Concepts (Po Cs) and Solution Design sessions, including hybrid and multi-cloud data streaming scenarios, to prove Confluent is the viable, low-latency streaming solution.
• Deliver high-impact technical presentations, whiteboarding sessions, and executive briefings, adapting language from low-level developers to C-suite and Line-of-Business executives.
• Provide hands-on guidance for performance tuning, architectural design, governance, and operational best practices.
• Identify and drive account expansion opportunities by helping customers envision new use cases.
• Represent Confluent at industry events and in the Apache Kafka community through talks, webinars, blog posts, and technical workshops.
• Contribute to the development of internal assets such as reusable architecture, demo environments, and enablement material.
• Technical Excellence
• Required technical and professional expertise
• 2+ years of experience in a pre-sales, prior customer-facing technical role (e. g., Solutions Engineer, Field Engineer).
• Proficiency in a programming language, such as Java, Python, or Go to write custom event-driven applications, SQL skills are a bonus
• Solid understanding of cloud-native architecture (AWS, GCP, Azure), containerization (Kubernetes), Networking, and security frameworks (m TLS, OAuth).
• Preferred technical and professional experience
• Expertise in the data streaming ecosystem: Apache Kafka and Confluent Cloud/Platform
• Hands-on experience with Apache Flink for stateful stream processing
• Business & Professional Skills
• Proven ability to influence enterprise-scale architecture decisions and guide C-level executives and technical stakeholders.
• Familiarity with enterprise sales methodologies, for example MEDDPICC to drive deal qualification and value selling.
• Excellent communication and storytelling skills, with the ability to simplify complex topics for a variety of audiences.
• Track record of cross-functional collaboration and the ability to influence internal teams to improve product fit and customer satisfaction.
• Preferred Technical And Professional Experience
• Fluency in German and English
• Industry-specific certifications (e. g., Confluent Certified Developer/Administrator) are highly valued.
• #J-18808-Ljbffr