Advisory Solutions Engineer

About the Role

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.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop in-depth understanding of Confluent’s technologies and the intricacies of building streaming applications.
• Collaborate to gather requirements, identify use cases, and facilitate the development of Proof of Concept (POC)/Pilot solutions.
• Aid customers in overcoming technical challenges during initial blueprinting and use case deployment.
• Collaborate with Account Executives (AEs) and Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) to bring offerings to new prospects.
• Craft and deliver tailored demos showcasing unique value propositions.
• Offer technical assistance in driving customer consumption through monthly customer health reports, Quarterly Business Reviews, and Quarterly Technical Reviews.
• Support cross-functional teams by conducting training sessions and workshops/webinars for customers, partners, prospects, and internal teams on Confluent's platform/cloud, features, and best practices.
• Contribute to vendor risk assessments.
• Assist in answering Requests for Proposals (RFPs) and Requests for Quotations (RFQs).
• Architect, build, and maintain reusable artifacts, including tools, prototypes, demos, workshops, and architecture blueprints.

Requirements & Tech Stack

• Solutions Engineering or similar work experience in a technical pre-sales capacity.
• A “scale” mindset with an ability to quickly leverage standardized demo environments, template proposals, and documented Proof of Concept (PoC) scopes.
• Experience with Event-Driven architecture, Data Integration & Processing Techniques, Database & Data Warehouse technologies.
• First-hand exposure to Cloud Architecture, Migrations, Deployment & Application Development.
• Experience with Automation, GitOps and Kubernetes.
• Proficiency in Java, Python or SQL.
• Development or implementation experience in a cloud-based environment.
• Clear, consistent demonstration of self-starter behavior, a desire to learn new things and tackle hard technical problems.
• Ability to manage multiple evaluation processes across various industry verticals and use cases; nimbleness and organization are a must.
• Exceptional presentation and communications capabilities to all levels across an organization.
• Ability to explain complex concepts in plain, non-technical language.
• Fluency in English.

Qualifications

• Master's Degree (Preferred Education)
• Technical certifications (e.g., Cloud Developer/Architect, Data Engineering & Integration).

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

• Previous experience building solutions with Apache Kafka.
• Understanding of systems operations concepts (disk, network, operating systems, etc).
• Experience with software development tools, infrastructure automation, and CI/CD tooling (Terraform, Ansible) is a plus.
• Experience building and operating large scale systems.
• Experience in technical pre-sales or consultative roles.