Customer Success Technical Architect

Join IBM Global Sales, where innovation, collaboration, and expertise converge to address our clients' most complex business challenges. Operating across diverse industries and regions, you will collaborate with colleagues, clients, and partners to co-develop solutions that foster digital transformation and create a lasting impact. Success in our Global Sales division is driven by curiosity, empathy, and teamwork. You will leverage technical knowledge alongside strong interpersonal skills to build trusted relationships and craft solutions that benefit both business and society. With comprehensive onboarding, ongoing learning opportunities, and a supportive organizational culture, IBM provides the tools and environment for career growth. Become part of a global team dedicated to driving innovation and making a meaningful difference. Your Role and Responsibilities As a Customer Success Technical Architect (CSTA), you will serve as a trusted technical advisor to Confluent (an IBM Company) clients post-adoption of our platform. Your mission is to ensure clients derive measurable value from their Confluent investments by enhancing technical health, accelerating adoption, guiding best-practice decisions, and proactively managing risks within their streaming environments. You will collaborate closely with the broader customer account team, including Customer Success, Sales, Solutions Engineering, Professional Services, Support, Product, and Engineering groups. This role demands technical expertise, customer leadership, structured execution, and the ability to translate complex architecture and operational topics into clear business benefits. What You Will Do

• Manage customer-facing technical delivery for a portfolio of strategic clients, aligning activities with customer objectives, adoption strategies, and desired business outcomes.
• Establish trusted-advisor relationships with technical and business stakeholders, ranging from practitioners and architects to senior executives.
• Offer proactive guidance on Confluent and Apache Kafka architecture, workload optimization, operational best practices, upgrades, reliability, security, governance, and adoption strategies.
• Maintain a consistent customer engagement rhythm through office hours, quarterly reviews, health assessments, roadmap discussions, and enablement sessions.
• Evaluate technical health, identify barriers to adoption, emerging risks, and develop actionable plans with defined owners, milestones, and follow-up.
• Coordinate with Support and cross-functional teams within Confluent and IBM on escalations, ensuring clients have clear remediation pathways and that actions are completed effectively.
• Assist clients in preparing for critical events such as upgrades, major launches, architecture modifications, and scaling production environments.
• Educate customer teams on Confluent features, recommended practices, and upcoming product developments.
• Gather customer feedback and product insights to enhance the client experience and influence product development directions.
• Contribute to the CSTA community by sharing technical expertise, creating reusable guidance, playbooks, and lessons learned.

Education Requirements Preferred Education: Bachelor's Degree Technical and Professional Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• At least 5 years of experience in customer-facing technical roles such as Customer Success Architect, Technical Account Manager, Solutions Architect, Support Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer, or similar.
• Ability to discuss application architecture, APIs, networking, security, observability, data integration, and production operations with technical stakeholders.
• Hands-on experience with one or more major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Strong understanding of cloud networking and security technologies (e.g., VPC, Private Link, Private Service Connect, TLS/SSL, SASL, Kerberos).
• Experience prototyping and analyzing code in multiple programming languages such as Java, Python, or Go to develop client solutions.
• Proficiency in JVM tuning and troubleshooting.
• Experience operating Linux environments, with the ability to configure, optimize, and troubleshoot RedHat and Debian-based distributions.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to lead structured discussions with technical teams and executive leadership.
• Capability to manage multiple customer priorities, clarify complex situations, and drive initiatives to completion.
• A proactive, consultative approach focused on issue prevention and delivering customer value rather than solely reactive problem-solving.
• Willingness to continuously learn in a fast-evolving technical landscape and share knowledge with peers.

Preferred Technical and Professional Experience

• Experience assisting clients in building distributed systems or streaming solutions utilizing Apache Kafka alongside technologies such as Spark, Flink, Hadoop, Cassandra, etc.
• Hands-on experience with Apache Kafka and Apache Flink.
• Confluent or Apache Kafka certification.
• Experience working with international, global customers.