Customer Success Technical Architect

Introduction

At IBM Global Sales, innovation, collaboration, and expertise come together to help clients address some of the most challenging business problems. Across industries and geographies, you will collaborate with colleagues, clients, and partners to co-develop solutions that enable digital transformation and deliver long-term impact.

Customer Success in Global Sales is grounded in curiosity, empathy, and teamwork. You’ll combine technical insight with strong people skills to build trusted relationships and shape solutions that improve both business performance and society. With world-class onboarding, ongoing learning, and a supportive culture, IBM provides the resources and opportunities to advance 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 outcomes from their Confluent investments by strengthening technical health, speeding up adoption, advising on best practices, and proactively managing risk across their streaming environments.

You will operate within the broader customer account team and work closely with Customer Success, Sales, Solutions Engineering, Professional Services, Support, Product, and Engineering. This position blends technical expertise with customer leadership, structured execution, and the ability to translate complex architecture and operational topics into clear business results.

What you will do

• Own customer-facing technical execution for a portfolio of strategic customers, aligning activities to customer goals, adoption plans, and the desired business outcomes.
• Establish trusted-advisor relationships with technical and business stakeholders, ranging from practitioners and architects to senior executives.
• Deliver proactive guidance on Confluent and Apache Kafka architecture, workload optimization, operational practices, upgrades, reliability, security, governance, and adoption.
• Drive a consistent customer operating rhythm through office hours, quarterly business reviews, health checks, roadmap alignment, and enablement.
• Evaluate technical health, uncover adoption blockers and emerging risks, and develop actionable plans with assigned owners, milestones, and ensured follow-through.
• Partner with Support and other Confluent and IBM teams during escalations, ensuring a clear customer path forward and tracking remediation efforts to completion.
• Help customers plan for critical events including upgrades, major launches, architecture changes, and production scaling.
• Train customer teams on Confluent capabilities, recommended practices, and relevant product updates.
• Share customer feedback and product insights with Confluent to enhance the customer experience and inform product strategy.
• Support 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 talk through 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