Customer Success Technical Architect

Introduction

At IBM Global Sales, we bring together innovation, collaboration, and expertise to help clients solve their most complex business challenges. Across industries and geographies, you will partner with colleagues, clients, and partners to co-create solutions that support digital transformation and deliver lasting impact.

Success in Global Sales is grounded in curiosity, empathy, and collaboration. You will bridge technical understanding with strong people skills, develop trusted relationships, and help shape solutions that improve business and society. With world-class onboarding, continuous learning, and a supportive culture, IBM provides the tools and opportunities to grow your career. 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 our platform. You will help customers realize measurable value from their Confluent investments by strengthening technical health, speeding up adoption, advising on best-practice decisions, and proactively managing risks across their streaming environments.

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

What you will do

• Own customer-facing technical execution for a portfolio of strategic customers, aligning activity to customer goals, adoption plans, and desired business outcomes.
• Develop trusted-advisor relationships with technical and business stakeholders, ranging from practitioners and architects to senior leaders.
• Provide proactive guidance on Confluent and Apache Kafka architecture, workload optimization, operational practices, upgrades, reliability, security, governance, and adoption.
• Run a consistent customer operating rhythm 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 owners, milestones, and ongoing follow-through.
• Coordinate with Support and other Confluent and IBM teams on escalations, ensuring the customer has a clear path forward and that remediation activities are monitored through completion.
• Help customers prepare for important events including upgrades, major launches, architecture changes, and production growth.
• Educate customer teams on Confluent capabilities, recommended practices, and relevant product developments.
• Share customer feedback and product insights back to Confluent to enhance customer experience and support product direction.
• Strengthen the CSTA practice by contributing 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 discuss application architecture, APIs, networking, security, observability, data integration, and production operations with technical stakeholders.
• 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, create clarity in ambiguous situations, and drive actions to completion.
• A proactive, consultative mindset focused on preventing issues and creating customer value rather than only reacting 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 use Apache Kafka alongside technologies such as Spark, Flink, Hadoop, Cassandra, etc

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