Advisory Solutions Engineer

Introduction

At IBM Global Sales, we unite innovation, collaboration, and expertise to help clients tackle some of their most complex business challenges. Across industries and geographies, you’ll work alongside colleagues, clients, and partners to co-create solutions that enable digital transformation and deliver lasting impact.Success in Global Sales is grounded in curiosity, empathy, and collaboration. In this environment, you’ll connect technical knowledge with strong interpersonal skills—building trusted relationships and shaping solutions that improve business outcomes and society. With world-class onboarding, continuous learning, and a supportive culture, IBM provides the tools and opportunities to help grow your career. Join us and contribute to a global team committed to driving innovation and making a difference.

Your Role And Responsibilities

Your Role and Responsibilities

Solutions Engineers at Confluent play a key role throughout the customer journey. They help customers evaluate the platform, define the appropriate technical approach, demonstrate value quickly, and build confidence in adopting data streaming patterns to address meaningful business problems. This position sits at the intersection of technical depth, customer discovery, solution design, and clear business value communication.

In this role, you will collaborate closely with Account Executives and cross-functional teams to uncover both stated and unstated customer needs, develop strong technical strategies, and support customers in achieving successful adoption of Confluent. You’ll be expected to lead technical discovery, own the technical win, and build lasting relationships with technical and business stakeholders.

What you will do

• Lead technical discovery with prospects and customers to identify business drivers, technical requirements, risks, and success criteria.
• Design and present solution architectures that clearly link Confluent capabilities to customer outcomes, technical constraints, and the long-term platform strategy.
• Own and lead technical evaluations, proofs of concept, and proof of value initiatives from initial scope through the technical win.
• Facilitate workshops, whiteboarding sessions, and architecture discussions with developers, architects, platform teams, and business stakeholders.
• Assist customers in adopting best practices for data streaming, cloud, hybrid, and event-driven architectures as they progress from single projects to broader platform adoption.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Support, Professional Services, and Customer Success to remove obstacles, refine solutions, and enhance customer outcomes.
• Support account strategy with Account Executives by helping qualify opportunities, build champions, and strengthen both the technical and business case for change.
• Create reusable assets such as demos, presentations, reference architectures, discovery patterns, or enablement materials that can be used across accounts.
• Mentor other Solutions Engineers by sharing best practices, providing constructive feedback, and helping raise the technical standards of the broader team.
  
  

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

• 5+ years of experience in Solutions Engineering, Sales Engineering, Solution Architecture, or a similar customer-facing technical role.
• Experience working with distributed systems, event-driven architectures, streaming or messaging platforms, data integration, and modern data platforms.
• Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure, networking, containers, Kubernetes, and modern application architectures.
• Ability to conduct high-quality discovery, connect pain points to solution approaches, and communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience leading technical evaluations, workshops, and customer presentations in complex enterprise sales cycles.
• Strong communication and presentation skills, with confidence engaging developers, architects, and senior customer stakeholders.
• Hands-on experience with one or more of Java, Python, SQL, or similar technologies commonly used to build and integrate data-driven applications.
• Self-starter mindset with strong judgment, curiosity, and the ability to learn quickly, work independently, and resolve ambiguous technical challenges.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate across functions and build trust with colleagues, customers, and partners.
  
  

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

• Experience with Kafka, Apache Flink, stream processing, or real-time analytics platforms.
• Familiarity with value-based selling, MEDDPICC or similar qualification frameworks.
• Experience producing repeatable demos, technical content, playbooks, or enablement materials for the wider field organization.
• Proven record of mentoring peers and influencing team practices beyond your own accounts.
• Comfort engaging senior customer stakeholders and contributing to larger platform or transformation conversations.