Solution 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. The Solutions Architect is a customer-facing technical role responsible for driving adoption and customer health throughout the post-sales customer lifecycle, helping customers maximise the value of their Confluent investment. In this role, you’ll manage a portfolio of customers, collaborating with internal and customer stakeholders to understand their goals, use cases, and challenges. You’ll analyse consumption and adoption patterns to identify underused capabilities and new workloads, partnering with the account team to progress expansion opportunities. Through tailored technical plans, guidance, and best practices, you’ll help customers resolve technical barriers, strengthen their implementations, and scale successfully while supporting retention. Key Responsibilities Technical Leadership & Expertise - Serve as the technical PoC across the customer post-sales lifecycle. Build strong relationships with technical and business stakeholders. Lead architecture discussions and best practices. Maintain deep expertise in streaming, cloud, and distributed systems. Drive customer technical health - Lead technical health assessments and translate findings into a prioritized roadmap with agreed owners, aligning recommendations with the customer’s architecture health and consumption goals. Track progress and reassess technical health Contribute to customer retention - Get the pulse of the customer and be on point for their satisfaction and expectations to address, together with the account team, churn and downgrade risks. Cross-Functional Orchestration during post-sales - Act as the Technical Voice of the Customer and coordinate across Sales, Customer Success, Support, Product, and Engineering to support customers´ vision. What You Will Bring: Technical Excellence ● Streaming Ecosystem: Hands-on Experience with Apache Kafka internals (storage, replication, protocols) and the Confluent Ecosystem (Confluent Cloud, Schema Registry, Connectors, and ksqlDB). ● Stream Processing & Analytics: Hands-on experience with Apache Flink for stateful stream processing, including state management, checkpointing/savepoints, windowing, and Flink SQL optimization. ● Development & Scripting: Proficiency in Java, Scala, or Python to write custom event-driven applications, producers/consumers, or user-defined functions (UDFs). ● Infrastructure & Ecosystems: Solid understanding of cloud provider ecosystems (AWS, Azure, or GCP), modern containerization (Kubernetes/Operators), and hybrid/on-prem deployment patterns. ● Enterprise Architecture & Governance: Working knowledge of security frameworks (mTLS, SASL/SCRAM, OAuth), data privacy regulations, and schema evolution (Avro, Protobuf). Business & Professional Skills ● Customer Enablement: Translate business needs into technical guidance and deliver knowledge that helps customers apply solutions independently. ● Critical Thinking & Problem-Solving: Analyse technical challenges, identify solutions, and recommend actionable steps aligned with customer goals. ● Persuasive Communication: Exceptional ability to deliver fundamental and highly customized presentations to multiple personas, seamlessly adapting language from developers to C-suite and Line-of-Business (LoB) executives. ● Commercial Acumen: Clear understanding of consumption-based cloud pricing, subscription licensing, and billing models to design strategic deployment plays that optimize long-term customer value. Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or equivalent practical experience. Industry-specific certifications (e.g., Confluent Certified Developer/Administrator) are highly valued. Experience: Minimum of 2–4 years of experience in a highly technical, customer-facing role (e.g., Solutions Engineering, Technical Consulting, or Enterprise Data Architecture). Language Skills: Fluency in English is required; proficiency in Italian, German, French, or Spanish is an advantage. United Kingdom Sales Hybrid Professional London, GB London (8660) IBM United Kingdom Limited Computer Science Consulting Data Architecture Education Engineering English French German Information Technology Italian Spanish Solutions Engineering Confluent