Solutions Engineer

Confluent - Little Rock, AR

Full-time - Mid Level

Little Rock, AR

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 position, you will collaborate closely with account representatives to serve as the technical advisor on the sales team. This role requires a strong partnership 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. You will be a trusted advisor to Confluent customers as they design and develop their end-to-end solutions, staying informed about the current state and future roadmap of Kafka in open source. Your responsibilities will include identifying known issues and informing customers of upcoming fixes or workarounds. Additionally, you will articulate Confluent's technical and product positioning to a diverse range of business and technical stakeholders, forging strong relationships throughout the sales cycle and beyond.

Responsibilities

• Drive the technical evaluation stage of the sales process.
• Partner with account representatives to provide technical advice.
• Collaborate closely with product management and engineering teams.
• Serve as a product advocate in front of prospects and customers.
• Assist customers in the technical design and development of their solutions.
• Stay informed about the current state and future roadmap of Kafka.
• Identify known issues and inform customers of fixes or workarounds.
• Articulate Confluent's technical and product positioning to stakeholders.
• Forge strong relationships with business and technical stakeholders throughout the sales cycle.

Requirements

• Experience with distributed systems and infrastructure software like databases, message queues, or Big Data products.
• Confidence in presenting to customers, including technical and business audiences.
• Demonstrated self-starter behavior and a desire to learn and tackle technical problems.
• Proficiency in Java, Python, or SQL.
• Experience building or running cloud applications.
• Exceptional presentation and communication skills, especially to enterprise architects and C-level executives.
• Experience building and operating large-scale systems.
• Previous sales engineering work experience.
• Experience building solutions with Apache Kafka.
• Work experience with data integration or application architecture.
• 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 of $132,400 - $155,610.
• Competitive equity package.
• Eligibility for additional commission and/or bonus pay.
• Wide range of employee benefits.