Senior Customer Success Technical Architect

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. Confluent is searching for a Staff Customer Success Technical Architect (Staff CSTA) to act as a trusted technical advisor and advocate to work with our customers. The primary objective of this role is to ensure the success, retention & expansion of our customers by providing technical guidance, including best practices, for the Confluent product suite. You will partner with others in Customer Solutions Group as well as cross-functional divisions such as Sales, Product Management and Engineering to help our customers accelerate time to value, maximize product consumption and achieve their overall business objectives. The CSTA role is both deeply technical and commercial in nature. You will leverage a technical background (e.g. AppDev, SysAdmin, Distributed Computing) to advise customers on their architectures, including patterns & strategies for operating and maturing their Confluent subscription. You will also utilize relationship management skills & industry experience to guide the customer on how they can best achieve their business goals and value-based outcomes via their Confluent investment. In this role, you will have the opportunity to build broad experience with Kafka, Flink and Confluent IP as well as gain an understanding of complementary and competitive technologies. You will work with a variety of organizations ranging from new start-ups to large enterprise customers. Throughout these interactions, you will build strong relationships, ensure exemplary delivery standards, and have a lot of fun helping our customers build state-of-the-art data streaming platforms! At Staff level, you will also be expected to extend this impact beyond your own customer portfolio. This includes independently leading complex or ambiguous customer situations, influencing senior stakeholders, shaping multi-quarter technical roadmaps and retention strategies, and turning your experience into reusable playbooks, enablement, and mentoring. You will also help advance the CSTA practice through hiring, onboarding, coaching, operational improvements, and cross-functional influence with Product, Support, Professional Services, Sales, and leadership. As a CSTA At Confluent, You Can Expect To

• Champion and advocate for the customer within Confluent. You will be the technical voice of the customer and will leverage learned technical insights & perspective while coordinating between Confluent Sales, Product, Services, Support and Training teams to drive technical success.
• Identify customer technical objections and develop strategies to address those blockers to adoption.
• Proactively support customers through technical lifecycle activities such as architecture planning, cluster & security design, monitoring & automation; review & provide guidance on upgrade or migration plans, platform & application hardening ideas and high availability design.
• Guide customers up the data streaming maturity curve through recommendations on advanced technical topics (e.g. data mesh, stream processing, utilization optimization & performance tuning)
• Develop and present periodic customer reviews, including analysis of technical health and operational performance, to Confluent senior management.
• Document and transfer knowledge to customers and internal teams. This assists customers in advancing their knowledge & abilities on their own, while also helping Technical Support Engineers and Professional Services teams better serve your customers.
• Leverage knowledge of your customer environments and use cases to influence the roadmap of Confluent products.
• When necessary, roll up your sleeves and dig in to help address customer issues alongside Confluent Technical Support Engineers and Core Engineering Additional Staff CSTA expectations: *Lead complex, high-visibility, or at-risk customer engagements with minimal supervision and bring structure to ambiguous situations. *Build trusted relationships with customer champions, senior leaders, and economic stakeholders, connecting technical priorities to business outcomes. *Define and drive multi-quarter technical success plans that improve customer health, adoption, consumption, retention, and growth. *Identify patterns across customers and turn them into reusable frameworks, playbooks, standards, and scalable ways of working for the wider CSTA team. *Mentor and coach CSTAs at different levels, helping them strengthen their technical judgment, customer communication, account strategy, and ability to manage risk. *Contribute to hiring, onboarding, interviewing, and enablement programs that raise the capability of the CSTA organization. *Influence cross-functional strategy by bringing data-backed customer insights to Product, Engineering, Support, Services, Sales, and CSTA leadership. *Represent and promote the value of the CSTA role in strategic account planning, expansion discussions, support upgrade conversations, and executive engagements. *Drive operational improvements across the CSTA practice, including tooling, processes, reporting, onboarding, knowledge management, and engagement quality. *Share expertise through internal forums, customer enablement, industry events, and written thought leadership that strengthens Confluent’s position in the data streaming ecosystem *Demonstrated success in a technical Field role for a product / SaaS company with enterprise customer *Passion for working on complex technical problems, with a strong understanding of modern infrastructure and streaming technologies; self-starter who loves a fast-paced environment *Excellent interpersonal & communication skills and an ability to concisely explain tricky issues and complex solutions to a variety of personas *Demonstrated ability to manage multiple customers at a time while paying strict attention to detail and delivering results across multiple initiatives such as driving expansion, customer satisfaction, feature adoption, and retention *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 *Ability to learn new technologies quickly, as well as a strong interest in doing so! *Flexibility to travel up to 20% of the time
• Experience with Apache Kafka and Apache Flink, including designing, deploying, operating, and troubleshooting production workloads.
• Experience helping enterprise customers build distributed systems or real-time streaming solutions using Apache Kafka alongside technologies such as Spark, Flink, Hadoop, Cassandra, or comparable platforms.
• Deep understanding of streaming architectures, event-driven design, data integration patterns, schema management, stream processing, and the operational considerations of highly available distributed systems.
• Experience assessing and improving the performance, scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency of Kafka or Flink-based solutions in production environments.
• Ability to guide customers through complex streaming migrations, modernization initiatives, platform adoption, or multi-cloud implementation strategies.
• Experience creating reference architectures, proofs of concept, technical demonstrations, or reusable implementation patterns for Kafka, Flink, and related technologies.
• Familiarity with observability, capacity planning, disaster recovery, governance, and security practices for enterprise streaming platforms.
• Experience contributing to technical communities through conference presentations, technical blogs, workshops, open-source projects, or internal enablement.
• Fluency in English and Arabic, with the ability to communicate effectively with customers and stakeholders in both languages