Customer Success Technical Architect

Introduction

At IBM Global Sales, we unite innovation, collaboration, and deep expertise to help clients address their most challenging business problems. Across industries and geographies, you’ll collaborate with colleagues, clients, and partners to co-design solutions that advance digital transformation and create lasting impact.Success in Global Sales depends on curiosity, empathy, and collaboration. You’ll combine technical insight with strong interpersonal skills to build trusted relationships and shape solutions that strengthen business outcomes and society. With world-class onboarding, ongoing learning, and a supportive culture, IBM provides the resources and career opportunities to grow. Join a global team committed 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) customers after they adopt the platform. Your goal is to help customers realize measurable value from their Confluent investments by improving technical health, accelerating adoption, advising on best practices, and proactively managing risks across their streaming environments.

You will be part of the larger customer account team and work closely with Customer Success, Sales, Solutions Engineering, Professional Services, Support, Product, and Engineering. This role blends technical expertise with customer leadership, structured execution, and the ability to translate complex architectural and operational topics into clear business outcomes.

What you will do

• Own customer-facing technical execution for a portfolio of strategic customers, ensuring activity is aligned to customer goals, adoption plans, and desired business outcomes.
• Develop trusted-advisor relationships with both technical and business stakeholders—ranging from hands-on practitioners and architects to senior leaders.
• Deliver proactive recommendations on Confluent and Apache Kafka architecture, workload optimization, operational practices, upgrades, reliability, security, governance, and adoption.
• Keep a consistent customer operating cadence through office hours, quarterly reviews, health checks, roadmap alignment, and enablement.
• Evaluate technical health, uncover adoption blockers and emerging risks, and produce clear action plans with accountable owners, milestones, and follow-through.
• Partner with Support and other Confluent and IBM teams to manage escalations, making sure customers have a clear path forward and that remediation efforts are monitored to completion.
• Help customers prepare for key milestones including upgrades, major launches, architecture changes, and production expansion.
• Educate customer teams on Confluent capabilities, recommended practices, and relevant product developments.
• Relay customer feedback and product insights back to Confluent to improve customer experience and guide product direction.
• Support the CSTA practice by sharing technical knowledge, reusable guidance, playbooks, and lessons learned.
  
  

Preferred Education

Master's Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related technical field, or comparable practical background.

• 5+ years of experience in a customer-facing technical role such as Customer Success Architect, Technical Account Manager, Solutions Architect, Support Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer, or equivalent.
• Ability to talk with technical stakeholders about application architecture, APIs, networking, security, observability, data integration, and production operations.
• Hands on knowledge of one or more key cloud vendors (AWS, GCP and Azure)
• Solid understanding of cloud networking and security technologies (e.g. VPC, Private Link, Private Service Connect, TLS/SSL, SASL, Kerberos, etc.)
• Experience prototyping and analyzing code for client solutions in multiple languages (e.g. Java, Python, Go, etc.)
• Experience with Java Virtual Machine (JVM) tuning and troubleshooting
• Experience with operating Linux, you know how to configure, tune and troubleshoot both RedHat & Debian based distributions
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to lead structured conversations with both technical teams and executives.
• Ability to manage multiple customer priorities, bring clarity to ambiguous situations, and drive actions through to completion.
• A proactive, consultative mindset focused on preventing issues and creating customer value rather than only responding to incidents.
• Willingness to continue learning in a rapidly evolving technical domain and to share knowledge with peers....Less
  
  

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

Experience helping customers build distributed systems or streaming solutions that utilize Apache Kafka with technologies such as Spark, Flink, Hadoop, Cassandra, etc

• Experience with Apache Kafka & Apache Flink
• Confluent or Apache Kafka certification
• Experience working with global customers