Senior Consulting Engineer

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

We are looking for a Senior Solution Engineer to join our Customer Success and Professional Services team. As a Senior Solution Architect, you will help customers leverage streaming architectures and applications to achieve their business results. In this role, you will interact directly with customers to provide software architecture, design, and operations expertise that leverages your deep knowledge of and experience in Apache Kafka platform, and complementary systems such as Hadoop, Spark, Storm, relational and NoSQL databases. You will develop and advocate best practices, gather and validate critical product feedback, and help customers overcome their operational challenges. Throughout all these interactions, you will build a strong relationship with your customer in a very short space of time, ensuring exemplary delivery standards. You will also have the opportunity to help customers build state-of-the-art streaming data infrastructure, in partnership with colleagues who are widely recognized as industry leaders, as well as optimizing and debugging customers' existing deployments.
What You Will Do
* Helping a customer determine their platform and/or application strategy for moving to a more real-time, event-based business. Such engagements often involve remote preparation; presenting an onsite or remote workshop for the customer's architects, developers, and operations teams; investigating (with Engineering and other coworkers) solutions to difficult challenges; and writing a recommendations summary doc.
* Providing feedback to the Product and Engineering groups
* Building tooling for another team or the wider company to help us push our technical boundaries and improve our ability to deliver consistently with high quality
* Testing performance and functionality of new components developed by Engineering
* Writing or editing documentation and knowledge base articles, including reference architecture materials and design patterns based on customer experiences
* Honing your skills, building applications, or trying out new product features
* Participating in community and industry events

Required education
Bachelor's Degree

Preferred education
Master's Degree

Required technical and professional expertise

* Deep experience designing, building, and operating in-production Big Data, stream processing, and/or enterprise data integration solutions, ideally using Apache Kafka
* Demonstrated experience successfully managing multiple B2B infrastructure software development projects, including driving expansion, customer satisfaction, feature adoption, and retention
* Experience operating Linux (configure, tune, and troubleshoot both RedHat and Debian-based distributions) Experience using cloud providers (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure) for running high-throughput systems
* Experience with Java Virtual Machine (JVM) tuning and troubleshooting
* Experience with distributed systems (Kafka, Hadoop, Cassandra, etc.)
* Strong desire to tackle hard technical problems, and proven ability to do so with little or no direct daily supervision
* Excellent communication skills, with an ability to clearly and concisely explain tricky issues and complex solutions
* Ability to quickly learn new technologies
* Ability and willingness to travel up to 20% of the time to meet with customers

Preferred technical and professional experience

NA

Years of Experience:
8-15