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. Working across industries and geographies, you'll partner with colleagues, clients, and partners to co-create solutions that drive digital transformation and lasting impact.Success in Global Sales is built on curiosity, empathy, and collaboration. You'll connect technical understanding with strong people skills, building trusted relationships and shaping solutions that improve business and society. With world-class onboarding, continuous learning, and a supportive culture, IBM offers the tools and opportunities to grow your career. Join us and be part of a global team that's passionate about driving innovation and making a difference.

Introduction

At IBM Global Sales, we bring together innovation, collaboration, and expertise to help clients solve their most complex business challenges. Working across industries and geographies, you'll partner with colleagues, clients, and partners to co-create solutions that drive digital transformation and lasting impact.Success in Global Sales is built on curiosity, empathy, and collaboration. You'll connect technical understanding with strong people skills, building trusted relationships and shaping solutions that improve business and society. With world-class onboarding, continuous learning, and a supportive culture, IBM offers the tools and opportunities to grow your career. Join us and be part of a global team that's passionate about driving innovation and making a difference.

Your Role And Responsibilities

As a Customer Success Technical Architect (CSTA), you will be a trusted technical advisor to Confluent (an IBM Company) customers after they adopt our platform. You will help customers achieve measurable value from their Confluent investments by improving technical health, accelerating adoption, guiding best-practice decisions, and proactively managing risks across their streaming environments.

You will work as part of the broader customer account team and partner closely with Customer Success, Sales, Solutions Engineering, Professional Services, Support, Product, and Engineering. The role combines 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.
  • Build trusted-advisor relationships with technical and business stakeholders, 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.
  • Maintain a regular customer operating rhythm via office hours, quarterly reviews, health checks, roadmap alignment, and enablement.
  • Assess technical health, identify adoption blockers and emerging risks, and create clear action plans with owners, milestones, and follow-through.
  • Coordinate with Support and other Confluent and IBM teams on escalations, ensuring the customer has a clear path forward and that remediation actions are tracked to completion.
  • Help customers prepare for critical events such as upgrades, major launches, architecture changes, and production growth.
  • Educate customer teams on Confluent capabilities, recommended practices, and relevant product developments.
  • Bring customer feedback and product insights back to Confluent, helping improve the customer experience and inform product direction.
  • Contribute to the CSTA practice by sharing technical knowledge, reusable guidance, playbooks, and lessons learned.

Preferred Education

Bachelor'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.

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
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