Customer Success Technical Architect, Confluent

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or engineering, mathematics, or equivalent degree or experience
• Demonstrated success in a technical Field role for a product / SaaS company with enterprise customers
• 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
• Collaborative spirit, outstanding consulting & relationship management skills and ability to rapidly switch context
• 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

Desirable

• Confluent is searching for a Customer Success Technical Architect (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 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
• 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