Solution 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. As a Solutions Engineer specializing in real-time data streaming, you will serve as a technical advisor and trusted thought partner to our enterprise accounts. You will own the technical relationship and drive the "technical win" during critical phases of the customer lifecycle. In this role, you will architect event-driven solutions using Apache Kafka and Apache Flink, navigate deep-dive technical discovery and dismantle advanced technical barriers to adoption. This role demands an individual who has competencies across cloud-native architectures, capable of mapping abstract business pain points directly to the Confluent product value proposition. Key Responsibilities

• Solution Architecture & Value Mapping: Architect tailored Confluent solutions that combine documented capabilities within the Data Streaming Platform to meet complex enterprise technical requirements.
• Structured Technical Discovery: Lead comprehensive technical discovery sessions with high-value prospects to uncover what the customer is solving for and, crucially, the Why.
• Strategic Deal Qualification (MEDDPICC): Actively participate in opportunity qualification alongside Account Executives. Use technical and business discovery to fill in critical components of the MEDDPICC framework (e.g., identifying Technical Criteria, building Champions, and shaping the business win).
• Advanced Proof-of-Concepts (PoCs) & RFI/RFIs: Lead, conduct, and manage the technical execution of RFPs/RFIs. Build and customize PoCs that definitively prove Confluent is the only viable, low-latency streaming solution to mitigate customer pain points.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration & Community Sharing: Act as an internal advocate for the customer. Proactively share key field learnings, architectural patterns, and competitive takeaways across core internal Slack channels to influence product roadmaps.
• Objection Handling & Escalation: Think on your feet to resolve complex technical objections that fall outside of standard documentation. Act as an escalation point for systemic issues, leveraging a deep understanding of Kafka/Flink internals, consumer group rebalances, and custom connectors.
• Managing Customer Health - Due to being the main customer technical point of contact, there are elements of driving post-sales technical health initiatives to ensure our customers maximise usage and value from the platform. What You Will Bring: Technical Excellence
• Streaming Ecosystem: Hands-on Experience with Apache Kafka internals (storage, replication, protocols) and the Confluent Ecosystem (Confluent Cloud, Schema Registry, Connectors, and ksqlDB).
• Stream Processing & Analytics: Hands-on experience with Apache Flink for stateful stream processing, including state management, checkpointing/savepoints, windowing, and Flink SQL optimization.
• Development & Scripting: Proficiency in Java, Scala, or Python to write custom event-driven applications, producers/consumers, or user-defined functions (UDFs).
• Infrastructure & Ecosystems: Solid understanding of cloud provider ecosystems (AWS, Azure, or GCP), modern containerization (Kubernetes/Operators), and hybrid/on-prem deployment patterns.
• Enterprise Architecture & Governance: Working knowledge of security frameworks (mTLS, SASL/SCRAM, OAuth), data privacy regulations, and schema evolution (Avro, Protobuf). Business & Professional Skills
• Persuasive Communication: Exceptional ability to deliver fundamental and highly customized presentations to multiple personas, seamlessly adapting language from developers to C-suite and Line-of-Business (LoB) executives.
• Competitive Intelligence: Strong understanding of how major competitors' products work, enabling you to proactively set competitive traps rather than simply reacting to standard objections.
• Commercial Acumen: Clear understanding of consumption-based cloud pricing, subscription licensing, and billing models to design strategic deployment plays that optimize long-term customer value. Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or equivalent practical experience. Industry-specific certifications (e.g., Confluent Certified Developer/Administrator) are highly valued. Experience: Minimum of 2–4 years of experience in a highly technical, customer-facing role (e.g., Solutions Engineering, Technical Consulting, or Enterprise Data Architecture). Language Skills: Fluency in English is required; proficiency in Italian, German, French, or Spanish is an advantage.