Solutions Engineer

Confluent - Boston, MA

Full-time - Mid Level

Boston, MA

Publishing Industries

About the position

Confluent Solutions Engineers (Pre-Sales) play a pivotal role in the technical evaluation stage of the sales process, making them essential to customer success as real-time data streams gain importance in modern enterprises. In this role, you will collaborate closely with account representatives to serve as the technical advisor on the sales team. You will work in tandem with product management and engineering teams, acting as a vital product advocate in front of prospects, customers, and the broader Kafka and Data Streaming communities. Your expertise will be crucial as you guide Confluent customers through the technical design and development of their end-to-end solutions. You will need to be well-versed in the current state and future roadmap of Kafka in open source, identifying known issues and informing customers of upcoming fixes or workarounds. Your responsibilities will include clearly articulating Confluent’s technical and product positioning to a diverse range of business and technical stakeholders, forging strong relationships with them throughout the sales cycle and beyond. This role requires a blend of technical acumen and interpersonal skills, as you will be presenting to highly skilled audiences, including enterprise architects and C-level executives. The ability to demonstrate self-starter behavior and a desire to learn new technologies and tackle complex technical challenges is essential for success in this position.

Responsibilities

• Drive the technical evaluation stage of the sales process as a Solutions Engineer.
• Partner with account representatives to provide technical advice and support during the sales cycle.
• Collaborate closely with product management and engineering teams to advocate for Confluent products.
• Serve as a trusted advisor to customers in the technical design and development of their solutions.
• Articulate Confluent's technical and product positioning to various stakeholders.
• Build and maintain strong relationships with prospects and customers throughout the sales process.
• Identify known issues and inform customers of upcoming fixes or workarounds related to Kafka.
• Present technical information confidently to a highly skilled audience.

Requirements

• Experience with distributed systems and infrastructure software such as databases, message queues, or Big Data products.
• Proficiency in Java, Python, or SQL.
• Experience building or running cloud applications.
• Exceptional presentation and communication skills, especially to technical and business audiences.
• Demonstrated self-starter behavior and a desire to tackle complex technical problems.
• Experience building and operating large-scale systems.
• Previous sales engineering work experience.
• Experience building solutions with Apache Kafka.
• Understanding of systems operations concepts (disk, network, operating systems, etc).
• Technical certifications such as a CS degree or cloud developer/architect/administrator.

Nice-to-haves

• Confluent Certified Developer or Confluent Certified Administrator.
• Knowledge of Kubernetes operations and cloud-based distributed computing.

Benefits

• Competitive pay and benefits in line with industry standards.
• Annual estimated salary range of $132,400 - $155,610.
• Competitive equity package.
• Eligibility for additional commission and/or bonus pay.