Advisory Solutions Engineer

Introduction

At IBM Global Sales, we unite innovation, teamwork, and technical excellence to help clients address their most challenging business needs. Across industries and geographies, you’ll collaborate with colleagues, clients, and partners to co-design solutions that accelerate digital transformation and create long-term value.

Success in Global Sales is driven by curiosity, empathy, and collaboration. You will combine technical knowledge with strong interpersonal skills—building trusted relationships and shaping solutions that benefit business and society. With world-class onboarding, ongoing learning, and a collaborative, supportive culture, IBM provides the resources and career opportunities to help you grow. Join a global team committed to advancing innovation and making a meaningful impact.

Your Role And Responsibilities

• Deep Expertise Development: Build and maintain an in-depth understanding of Confluent’s technologies and the details involved in developing streaming applications.
• Technical Discovery and POC/Pilot Solutions: Work with Confluent solutions engineers to collect requirements, define use cases, and enable Proof of Concept (POC)/Pilot development. Help customers address technical hurdles during initial blueprinting and use case deployment.
• Prospect Demos and Evangelization: Partner closely with Confluent Account Executives (AEs) and Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) to engage new prospects. Create and deliver customized demos that go beyond standard presentations, highlighting Confluent’s unique value proposition.
• Customer Engagement: Provide technical support to increase customer adoption through monthly customer health reports, Quarterly Business Reviews, and Quarterly Technical Reviews.
• Knowledge Sharing, Workshops, and Training: Assist cross-functional teams, including Field Marketing and Partner Solutions, by leading training sessions and workshops/webinars for customers, partners, prospects, and internal teams. Educate audiences on Confluent’s platform/cloud, features, and best practices.
• RFP/Vendor risk assessment Support: Participate in vendor risk assessments to ensure a full understanding of potential risks and opportunities tied to proposed solutions. Support responses to Requests for Proposals (RFPs) and Requests for Quotations (RFQs).
• Technical Artifact Creation and Maintenance: Design, build, and keep reusable artifacts such as tools, prototypes, demos, workshops, and architecture blueprints.
  
  

Preferred Education

Master's Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

• Solutions Engineering or comparable experience in a technical pre-sales role.
• Process & Efficiency, with a 'scale' mindset. Ability to quickly leverage standardized demo environments, template proposals, and documented Proof of Concept (PoC) scopes to reduce preparation time.
  
  

Experience with Event-Driven architecture, Data Integration & Processing Techniques, Database & Data Warehouse technologies.

• Direct experience with Cloud Architecture, Migrations, Deployment & Application Development.
• Experience with Automation, GitOps and Kubernetes.
• Proficiency in Java, Python or SQL.
• Experience developing or implementing in a cloud-based environment, along with Technical certifications (e.g., Cloud Developer/Architect, Data Engineering & Integration).
• Consistent demonstration of self-starter behavior, with a strong desire to learn new topics and solve challenging technical problems.
• Ability to manage multiple evaluation processes across different industry verticals and use cases; must be agile and highly organized.
• Outstanding presentation and communication abilities across all organizational levels.
• Ability to explain complex concepts in clear, non-technical language that resonates with mid-level managers and business owners.
• Fluency in English is a requisite.
  
  

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

• Prior experience building solutions with Apache Kafka.
• Knowledge of systems operations concepts (disk, network, operating systems, etc).
• Experience with software development tools, infrastructure automation, and CI/CD tooling (Terraform, Ansible) is a plus
• Experience building and operating large scale systems.
• Experience in technical pre-sales or consultative roles.