Staff Solutions Architect

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. 1. Your role and responsibilities You will own the technical success of Confluent Professional Services engagements: design and validate customer architectures, create delivery plans and implementation backlogs, lead workshops, and provide advisory-level guidance across Confluent Cloud (CC) and Confluent Platform (CP) engagements. 2. As a Solutions Architect at Confluent, you can expect to Act as a Cloud (CC) and Confluent Platform (CP) expert Conduct discovery, design, and architecture sessions with customers Define project scope, delivery plans, and backlogs aligned to customer objectives Provide advisory-level best practices for live deployments Perform cluster health assessments and configuration reviews Offer guidance on Kafka best practices and operational efficiency Advise on security, monitoring, infrastructure, patching, and configuration management 3. Additional Solutions Architect expectations Customer Empathy: Understand business goals behind the architecture Clarity & Authority: Communicate complex designs simply to non-technical and technical stakeholders Ownership: Take accountability for outcomes, not only deliverables Pragmatism: Balance ideal designs with delivery feasibility Collaboration: Work seamlessly with Field Engineers, Engagement Managers, Solutions Engineers, Account Executivess, and Partners Solid experience in architecture or consulting focused on distributed systems and data streaming. Deep Kafka and Confluent experience across design, operations, and migration. Proven expertise in system and data-flow design (Kafka, Flink, ksqlDB, etc) along with secure configuration, encryption, RBAC, monitoring and network policies. Cloud certifications (AWS, GCP, and Azure).