Senior 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. The Solutions Engineer is a trusted technical advisor to our customers and a key member of the account squad, working alongside Account Executives, Customer Success, CSTAs and specialists to deliver measurable customer value and sustainable consumption growth. Our SEs combine strong technical expertise, customer understanding and commercial awareness. They identify new workloads and use cases, shape the right architecture, achieve the technical win and maintain momentum through to production.Success isn't simply what we demonstrate, design or sell. It's the customer value and consumption we help create. What you'll do Be a trusted technical advisor Build trusted relationships with developers, architects, engineering leaders and senior technology stakeholders. Develop a deep understanding of each customer's business, architecture, priorities and challenges. Use your expertise in data streaming, distributed systems and modern data architectures to solve complex customer problems. Lead discovery and architecture discussions, connecting Confluent's capabilities to meaningful business and technical outcomes. Constructively challenge customers and help shape their data streaming strategy and architecture. Create and grow consumption Proactively identify new workloads and use cases across new and existing customers. Lead projects through Scope, Design, Implement and Production phases. Establish clear technical success criteria, customer outcomes and next steps. Maintain momentum, identify blockers and bring together the right people to move projects forward. Ensure technical wins progress beyond demos and evaluations into production workloads. Continually identify opportunities to expand customer value and consumption. Operate as part of the account squad Work closely with Account Executives, Customer Success and Technical Architects around shared customer priorities and outcomes. Own the technical strategy and new consumption opportunities within your accounts. Contribute actively to account planning, bringing the technical and customer perspective. Maintain a clear view of workloads, opportunities, risks and blockers. Bring together Product, Engineering, Support, IBM and specialist expertise when required. Create a joined-up customer experience across the account team. Deliver technical excellence Lead technical discovery, workshops, demonstrations, architecture discussions and evaluations. Design scalable, resilient and secure data streaming architectures. Understand how Confluent fits within wider enterprise architectures including cloud, applications, databases, data platforms, APIs and AI. Maintain strong knowledge of Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, event-driven architecture, stream processing and the wider data ecosystem. Translate complex technology into clear business and technical value Strong experience in Solutions Engineering, Pre-Sales, Solution Architecture, Software Engineering or a similar customer-facing technical role. Strong knowledge of data streaming, distributed systems and modern data architectures. Understanding of event-driven architectures, real-time data pipelines, integration patterns, APIs and cloud technologies. Experience designing or advising on complex enterprise architectures. Strong discovery skills and the ability to connect technical requirements to business outcomes. The credibility to engage with developers and architects while communicating effectively with CIOs, CTOs and other senior stakeholders. Strong communication, presentation and technical storytelling skills. A commercial mindset and understanding of how technical activity translates into customer value and consumption. Curiosity, ownership and a collaborative approach to solving customer problems. What gives you an edge Hands-on experience with Apache Kafka, Apache Flink or other streaming technologies. Software engineering or hands-on architecture experience. Experience with AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. Knowledge of databases, data warehouses, data lakes, analytics and AI architectures. Experience in a consumption or usage-based software business. Experience working with large, complex enterprise customers.