Solutions Architect

Confluent is pioneering a fundamentally new category of data infrastructure focused on data in motion. Have you ever found a new favourite series on Netflix, picked up groceries curbside at Walmart, or paid for something using Square? That’s the power of data in motion in action—giving organisations instant access to the massive amounts of data that is constantly flowing throughout their business. At Confluent, we’re building the foundational platform for this new paradigm of data infrastructure. Our cloud-native offering is designed to be the intelligent connective tissue enabling real-time data, from multiple sources, to constantly stream across the organisation. With Confluent, organisations can create a central nervous system to innovate and win in a digital-first world.

We’re looking for self-motivated team members who crave a challenge and feel energised to roll up their sleeves and help realise Confluent’s enormous potential. Chart your own path and take healthy risks as we solve big problems together. We value having diverse teams and want you to grow as we grow—whether you’re just starting out in your career or managing a large team, you’ll be amazed at the magnitude of your impact.

About the role:
Solutions Architects drive customer success by helping them realize business value from the burgeoning flow of realtime data streams in their organizations. In this role you’ll interact directly with our customers to provide software architecture, development and operations expertise, leveraging deep knowledge of best practices in the use of Apache Kafka, the broader Confluent Platform, and complementary systems like Hadoop, Spark, Storm, relational databases, and various NoSQL databases.

Throughout all of these interactions, you’ll build strong relationships with customers, ensure exemplary delivery standards, and have a lot of fun building state-of-the-art streaming data infrastructure alongside colleagues who are widely recognized as experts in this space.

Promoting Confluent and our amazing team to the community and wider public audience is something we invite all our employees to take part in. This can be in the form of writing blog posts, speaking at meetups and well-known industry events about use cases and best practices, or as simple as releasing code.

A typical week at Confluent in this role may involve

Preparing for an upcoming engagement, discussing the goals and expectations with the customer and preparing an agenda
- Researching best practices or components required for the engagement
- Delivering an engagement on-site, working with the customer’s architects and developers in a workshop environment
- Producing and delivering the post-engagement report to the customer
- Project work that may involve building tooling for another team, performance testing components for Engineering or improving documentation and knowledge base articles

Required skills and experience

Excellent technical skills and industry experience are a must, as you’ll be representing Confluent Inc, working with some of the best companies and sharpest minds. Credibility is key, in the knowledge and skills you’ll be calling on and delivering to customers. We don’t expect everyone who joins us to be Kafka experts, but we do want to see some tentpole achievements and skills.
- Deep experience designing, building, and operating in-production Big Data, stream processing, and/or enterprise data integration solutions using Apache Kafka
- Exceptional interpersonal communications capabilities demonstrated through a history of successful B2B infrastructure software development projects
- Strong desire to tackle hard technical problems and proven ability do so with little or no direct daily supervision
- Bachelor’s level degree in Computer Science or an engineering, mathematics, or another quantitative field
- Proficiency in Java
- Use of Amazon Web Services for running high throughput systems
- Skilled in operating Linux, you know how to configure, tune and troubleshoot both RedHat & Debian based distributions
- Some travel may form part of your work but it is limited and suitable for work-life balance and those with families and personal commitments

Extras

There are always extra skills that can give you an edge, not necessarily just in technology:
Previous experience building solutions that use Apache Kafka alongside Hadoop, relational and NoSQL databases, message queues, and related products
- Scala, Python or Go experience
- Commercial acumen, experience working alongside commercial teams
- Prior experience working for a technology startup
- Project management experience, working with any known methodology and more importantly, being able to scope, manage and deliver on a plan no matter how simple or complex

Culture is a huge part of Confluent, we’re searching for the best people who not only excel at their role, but also contribute to the health, happiness and growth of the company. Inclu