Solutions Architect

About the Role:

As a Solutions Architect (Confluent Cloud), you serve as the trusted technical advisor to our customers, responsible for bridging complex business requirements with the power of the Confluent Data Streaming Platform and the broader ecosystem. In this high-impact, hands-on role, you will consult directly with customers to provide software architecture, design, and operations expertise, leveraging your deep knowledge of Apache Kafka, Confluent products, and complementary technologies like Spark, Flink, and Kubernetes. You are expected to quickly build strong relationships, helping customers design and implement state-of-the-art streaming data infrastructure, advocate for best practices, and collaborate with your colleagues to optimize and debug existing deployments. Ultimately, your goal is to ensure exemplary delivery standards while gathering critical product feedback to help our customers overcome operational challenges and achieve sustained success.

What You Will Do:

• Guide customers in developing strategies to modernize their data platforms and move toward event-driven architectures through workshops and hands-on collaboration. Such engagements often involve remote preparation, presenting onsite or remotely, investigating (with Engineering and other coworkers) solutions to difficult challenges, and writing a recommendations summary doc
• Provide feedback to the Confluent Product and Engineering groups
• Build tooling for another team or the wider company to help us push our technical boundaries and improve our ability to deliver consistently with high quality
• Test performance and functionality of new components developed by Engineering
• Write or edit documentation and knowledge base articles, including reference architecture materials and design patterns based on customer experiences. Hone your skills, building applications, or trying out new product features
• Participate in community and industry events
• Lead the hands-on implementation of production-ready deployments, guiding customer teams through the entire lifecycle from initial development to a successful production launch.

What You Will Bring:

• 5+ years as a Solutions Architect or similar work experience
• Deep experience designing, building, and operating in-production Big Data, stream processing, and/or enterprise data integration solutions, ideally using Apache Kafka
• Demonstrated experience successfully managing multiple B2B infrastructure software development projects, including driving expansion, customer satisfaction, feature adoption, and retention
• 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 modern distributed data systems, such as cloud data platforms (e.g., Snowflake, Databricks), container orchestration (Kubernetes, OpenShift), and other NoSQL or stream processing technologies.
• Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and CI/CD tools, particularly Terraform for cloud automation and Ansible for on-premise deployments.
• Proficiency in Java
• Excellent communication and consulting skills, with an ability to clearly and concisely explain tricky issues and complex solutions
• Ability and willingness to travel up to 25% of the time to meet with customers

Qualifications

• BE Computers or any IT degree
• Confluent Cloud Operator and Developer Certified is a must