Introduction

At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world.

Your Role And Responsibilities

As a Senior Technical Support Engineer in Global Technical Support, you will lead the resolution of Confluent's most complex customer issues and help raise the technical capability of the wider support organization. You will work directly with customers on high-impact incidents, ambiguous investigations, and complex escalations while providing calm, credible technical leadership throughout the resolution process.

Own and drive the most complex customer cases and high-severity P1–P3 escalations across production and non-production environments.
Act as a trusted technical point of contact for strategic customers during critical incidents and difficult customer situations.
Lead technically challenging investigations involving Confluent products, Kafka Connect, CDC, distributed systems, cloud architectures, performance, availability, security, and integrations.
Establish clear problem-resolution plans, root-cause hypotheses, reproduction strategies, mitigation options, risks, timelines, and stakeholder communication paths.
Perform deep diagnosis using source-code analysis, logs, metrics, lab environments, controlled reproductions, instrumentation, and other advanced troubleshooting techniques.
Determine whether an issue is caused by product behavior, configuration, third-party dependencies, customer code, or environmental constraints.
Engage Engineering and Product teams with high-quality, actionable escalations and advocate for product quality and supportability improvements.
Identify patterns across cases and customers, and convert those insights into scalable runbooks, tools, knowledge articles, training, process improvements, and customer self-service.
Provide technical guidance, mentoring, coaching, onboarding support, and enablement for TSEs and other GTS partners.
Help establish and improve troubleshooting standards, escalation practices, retrospectives, queue health, and operational resilience.
Represent GTS in cross-functional initiatives and communicate complex technical challenges and recommendations to engineers, product managers, leaders, account teams, and customers.
Contribute to technical communities and thought leadership through presentations, technical content, demos, open-source contributions, or other appropriate forums.
Balance hands-on case leadership with scalable improvements that raise the capability of the broader GTS organization.

Preferred Education

Master's Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

8+ years experience in Demonstrated experience solving complex customer or production issues involving distributed systems, data platforms, cloud infrastructure, or enterprise software.
Deep expertise in at least one Confluent domain or product area and meaningful technical breadth across related technologies.
Strong experience diagnosing, reproducing, and resolving difficult customer issues with incomplete or ambiguous information.
Deep troubleshooting experience with Linux, networking, resource contention, and system performance.
Strong knowledge of Java/JVM applications and diagnostic techniques such as thread, heap, and memory analysis, or equivalent depth in another relevant runtime.
Experience with at least one mainstream distributed system, such as Apache Kafka, Kafka Connect, Hadoop, Cassandra, or a comparable platform.
Experience with modern cloud architectures on AWS, Azure, and/or Google Cloud, including networking, identity, security, and integration patterns.
Strong analytical judgment and the ability to see the broader ecosystem of technologies, platforms, products, services, and customer dependencies.
Excellent written, verbal, presentation, and stakeholder-management skills, including the ability to explain complex technical issues to audiences ranging from engineers to executives.
Demonstrated ability to influence without authority, build trust across functions, manage difficult conversations, and maintain composure during high-pressure incidents.
Demonstrated ability to mentor others, share knowledge, and improve the capability and effectiveness of a technical team.
Ability to work independently with minimal guidance while managing competing strategic and tactical priorities.

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

Work across multiple domains, including Kafka, distributed systems, JVM, Linux, cloud, networking, and security..

Sr. Technical Support Engineer - Confluent