Senior Solutions Architect, Confluent

• Deep experience designing, building, and operating in-production Big Data, stream processing, and/or enterprise data integration solutions, ideally using Apache Kafka
• Deep understanding on the creation of re-usable data products and how customers can overcome challenges with their adoption
• Ability to work well individually and within a cross-functional (and sometimes geographically dispersed) teams
• Demonstrated experience successfully managing multiple B2B infrastructure software development projects, including driving expansion, customer satisfaction, feature adoption, and retention
• Strong interpersonal, presentation and negotiating skills to quickly establish rapport and credibility at all levels within an organization
• Experience operating Linux (configure, tune, and troubleshoot both RedHat and Debian-based distributions)
• Experience using cloud providers (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure) for running high-throughput systems
• Experience with Java Virtual Machine (JVM) tuning and troubleshooting
• Experience with distributed systems (Kafka, Hadoop, Cassandra, etc.)
• Proficiency in Java
• Strong desire to tackle hard technical problems, and proven ability to do so with little or no direct daily supervision
• Excellent communication skills, with an ability to clearly and concisely explain tricky issues and complex solutions
• Extensive customer relationship management experience and collaboration skills
• Ability to quickly learn new technologies
• Ability and willingness to travel to meet with customers

Desirable

• We are looking for a Solutions Architect to join our Professional Services team
• As a Senior Solutions Architect (SA), you will help customers leverage streaming architectures and applications to achieve their business outcomes
• In this role, you will engage directly with customers to provide software architecture, design, and operations expertise that leverages your deep knowledge of and experience in Apache Kafka, the Confluent platform, and complementary systems
• Join our dynamic, fast-growing Professional Services team and help us accelerate the delivery of streaming data for the enterprise
• As the ideal candidate, you will work closely with multiple teams inside the organization and within our partner ecosystem to drive consistency, provide best practices, and accelerate the realization of business value for our customers through adoption of Confluent data in motion capabilities
• You will develop and advocate best practices, gather and validate critical product feedback, and help customers overcome their operational challenges
• Throughout all these interactions, you will build a strong relationship with your customer in a very short space of time, quickly gaining “trusted advisor” status ensuring exemplary delivery standards
• You will also have the opportunity to help customers build state-of-the-art streaming data infrastructure, in partnership with colleagues who are widely recognized as industry leaders
• In addition you will help optimize and provide guidance and direction on next steps and streaming adoption roadmaps for customer’s existing deployments
• Understand our customers business drivers and strategy and create the vision and roadmap to establish a Confluent Data Streaming Platform within their environment
• Design an executable data streaming strategy that encompasses how our customers can drive value from their data through a unified Data Streaming Platform and an appropriate operating model (ways of working)
• Help our customers determine their platform and/or application strategy for moving to a real-time, event-based business
• Present onsite or remote workshops for the customer’s architects, developers, and operations teams
• Investigate solutions to difficult challenges
• Write and present recommendations, architecture decisions, design documentation for customers
• Be a thought leader on Data Streaming best practices, incorporating both the technological and the organisation, process and wider governance aspects
• Support the practice in presales activities, including requirements gathering, estimates, and compelling professional services/delivery proposals
• Creating reusable assets to help develop the practice and push our technical, process, operational boundaries and improve our ability to deliver consistently with high quality