Solution Architect

IBM
IBM

IT

London, UK

Posted on Nov 10, 2026
Introduction

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.

Your role and responsibilities

The Solutions Architect is a customer-facing technical role responsible for driving adoption and customer health throughout the post-sales customer lifecycle, helping customers maximise the value of their Confluent investment.

In this role, you’ll manage a portfolio of customers, collaborating with internal and customer stakeholders to understand their goals, use cases, and challenges. You’ll analyse consumption and adoption patterns to identify underused capabilities and new workloads, partnering with the account team to progress expansion opportunities. Through tailored technical plans, guidance, and best practices, you’ll help customers resolve technical barriers, strengthen their implementations, and scale successfully while supporting retention.

Key Responsibilities

  • Technical Leadership & Expertise - Serve as the technical PoC across the customer post-sales lifecycle. Build strong relationships with technical and business stakeholders. Lead architecture discussions and best practices. Maintain deep expertise in streaming, cloud, and distributed systems.
  • Drive customer technical health - Lead technical health assessments and translate findings into a prioritized roadmap with agreed owners, aligning recommendations with the customer’s architecture health and consumption goals. Track progress and reassess technical health
  • Contribute to customer retention - Get the pulse of the customer and be on point for their satisfaction and expectations to address, together with the account team, churn and downgrade risks.
  • Cross-Functional Orchestration during post-sales - Act as the Technical Voice of the Customer and coordinate across Sales, Customer Success, Support, Product, and Engineering to support customers´ vision.

What You Will Bring:

Technical Excellence

● Streaming Ecosystem: Hands-on Experience with Apache Kafka internals (storage, replication, protocols) and the Confluent Ecosystem (Confluent Cloud, Schema Registry, Connectors, and ksqlDB).

● Stream Processing & Analytics: Hands-on experience with Apache Flink for stateful stream processing, including state management, checkpointing/savepoints, windowing, and Flink SQL optimization.

● Development & Scripting: Proficiency in Java, Scala, or Python to write custom event-driven applications, producers/consumers, or user-defined functions (UDFs).

● Infrastructure & Ecosystems: Solid understanding of cloud provider ecosystems (AWS, Azure, or GCP), modern containerization (Kubernetes/Operators), and hybrid/on-prem deployment patterns.

● Enterprise Architecture & Governance: Working knowledge of security frameworks (mTLS, SASL/SCRAM, OAuth), data privacy regulations, and schema evolution (Avro, Protobuf).

Business & Professional Skills

● Customer Enablement: Translate business needs into technical guidance and deliver knowledge that helps customers apply solutions independently.

● Critical Thinking & Problem-Solving: Analyse technical challenges, identify solutions, and recommend actionable steps aligned with customer goals.

● Persuasive Communication: Exceptional ability to deliver fundamental and highly customized presentations to multiple personas, seamlessly adapting language from developers to C-suite and Line-of-Business (LoB) executives.

● Commercial Acumen: Clear understanding of consumption-based cloud pricing, subscription licensing, and billing models to design strategic deployment plays that optimize long-term customer value.

Required education
Bachelor's Degree
Required technical and professional expertise
  • Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or equivalent practical experience. Industry-specific certifications (e.g., Confluent Certified Developer/Administrator) are highly valued.
  • Experience: Minimum of 2–4 years of experience in a highly technical, customer-facing role (e.g., Solutions Engineering, Technical Consulting, or Enterprise Data Architecture).
  • Language Skills: Fluency in English is required; proficiency in Italian, German, French, or Spanish is an advantage.

ABOUT BUSINESS UNIT

IBM has a global presence, operating in more than 175 countries with a broad-based geographic distribution of revenue. The company’s Global Markets organization is a strategic sales business unit that manages IBM’s global footprint, working closely with dedicated country-based operating units to serve clients locally. These country teams have client relationship managers who lead integrated teams of consultants, solution specialists and delivery professionals to enable clients’ growth and innovation. By complementing local expertise with global experience and digital capabilities, IBM builds deep and broad-based client relationships. This local management focus fosters speed in supporting clients, addressing new markets and making investments in emerging opportunities. Additionally, the Global Markets organization serves clients with expertise in their industry as well as through the products and services that IBM and partners supply. IBM is also expanding its reach to new and existing clients through digital marketplaces.

YOUR LIFE @ IBM

In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that, dedication to our clients success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.

Being an IBMer means you’ll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you’ll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment everyday, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background.

Our IBMers are growth minded, always staying curious, open to feedback and learning new information and skills to constantly transform themselves and our company. They are trusted to provide on-going feedback to help other IBMers grow, as well as collaborate with colleagues keeping in mind a team focused approach to include different perspectives to drive exceptional outcomes for our customers. The courage our IBMers have to make critical decisions everyday is essential to IBM becoming the catalyst for progress, always embracing challenges with resources they have to hand, a can-do attitude and always striving for an outcome focused approach within everything that they do.

Are you ready to be an IBMer?

ABOUT IBM

IBM’s greatest invention is the IBMer. We believe that through the application of intelligence, reason and science, we can improve business, society and the human condition, bringing the power of an open hybrid cloud and AI strategy to life for our clients and partners around the world.

Restlessly reinventing since 1911, we are not only one of the largest corporate organizations in the world, we’re also one of the biggest technology and consulting employers, with many of the Fortune 500 companies relying on the IBM Cloud to run their business.

At IBM, we pride ourselves on being an early adopter of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and blockchain. Now it’s time for you to join us on our journey to being a responsible technology innovator and a force for good in the world.

IBM is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, or other characteristics protected by the applicable law. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.

OTHER RELEVANT JOB DETAILS

For additional information about location requirements, please discuss with the recruiter following submission of your application.

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