Technical Support Professional

About the Role

At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions by building AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation.

As a Technical Support Engineer on the Platform, Security & Cloud (PSC) team, you'll help customers solve their hardest problems with security, networking, and infrastructure in Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform. You'll work directly with customers' engineering, network, and security teams to diagnose and resolve issues, including production-impacting incidents. You'll also be the link that brings insights from the field back to our engineering teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Troubleshoot and resolve customer issues across Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform, with a focus on security, cloud networking, and Kubernetes deployments.
• Lead live troubleshooting sessions with customer engineering, network, and security teams on production-impacting issues.
• Reproduce problems, analyze logs and configuration, and escalate clearly to engineering when an issue is a product bug or platform limit.
• Provide real-time product feedback to engineering teams from the field.
• Write knowledge base articles and documentation.
• Help improve team processes and build knowledge of Apache Kafka and the Confluent ecosystem.

Requirements & Tech Stack

• Excitement about streaming data and becoming an expert in Apache Kafka.
• A track record of diagnosing, reproducing, and resolving technical issues for customers or users.
• Comfortable on live calls during production-impacting issues, and able to explain findings clearly to both customers and engineers.
• Confident on the Linux command line, reading logs and stack traces to find root cause.
• Two of the following three:
• Security: TLS/certificates, authentication (SASL, OAuth, mTLS) and authorization (ACLs, RBAC).
• Cloud networking: DNS, routing, firewalls and proxies, and private connectivity (PrivateLink, VPC peering) on at least one cloud provider.
• Infrastructure: running applications on Kubernetes, or deploying with Ansible or Terraform.

Qualifications

Preferred Education: Master's Degree

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience:

• Experience with SSO and identity providers (Microsoft Entra ID, Okta).
• Hands-on experience with Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform, including upgrades or KRaft migrations.