Solutions 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
As an Advisory Solutions Engineer specializing in real-time data streaming, you will serve as a premier technical advisor and trusted thought partner to our most strategic enterprise accounts. You will own the technical relationship and drive the "technical win" during critical phases of the customer lifecycle. In this role, you will architect complex event-driven solutions using Apache Kafka and Apache Flink, navigate deep-dive technical discoveries utilizing the CLUSTTER framework, and dismantle advanced technical barriers to adoption. This role demands an individual who is fully competent across cloud-native architectures, capable of mapping abstract business pain points directly to the Confluent product value proposition, and passionate about mentoring early-career engineers.

Key Responsibilities:

Solution Architecture & Value Mapping: Architect tailored Confluent solutions that combine documented capabilities (Confluent Cloud/Platform, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, Flink SQL) to meet complex enterprise technical requirements. Effectively utilize conceptual frameworks, such as the Confluent "Layer Cake," during interactive white boarding sessions.
Structured Technical Discovery: Lead comprehensive technical discovery sessions with high-value prospects to meticulously uncover what the customer is solving for and, crucially, the Why.
Strategic Deal Qualification (MEDDPICC): Actively participate in opportunity qualification alongside Account Executives beyond Stage 3.5. Use technical and business discovery to fill in critical components of the MEDDPICC framework (e.g.,identifying Technical Criteria, building Champions, and shaping the business win).
Advanced Proof-of-Concepts (Po Cs) & RFI/RFIs: Lead, conduct, and manage the technical execution of RFPs/RFIs. Build and customize undeniable Po Cs/POTs (Proof of Technology) that definitively prove Confluent is the only viable, low-latency streaming solution to mitigate customer pain points.
Cross-Functional Collaboration & Community Sharing: Act as a fierce internal advocate for the customer. Proactively share key field learnings, architectural patterns, and competitive takeaways across core internal Slack channels to influence product roadmaps.
Objection Handling & Escalation: Think on your feet to resolve complex technical objections that fall outside of standard documentation. Act as an escalation point for systemic issues, leveraging a deep understanding of Kafka/Flink internals, consumer group rebalances, and custom connectors.
Required education
Bachelor's Degree
Required technical and professional expertise
Streaming Ecosystem Mastery: Production-level experience with Apache Kafka internals (storage, replication, protocols) and the Confluent Ecosystem (Confluent Cloud,Schema Registry, Connectors, and ksqlDB).
Stream Processing & Analytics: Strong hands-on experience with Apache Flink for stateful stream processing, including state management, checkpointing/savepoints, windowing, and Flink SQL optimization.
Development & Scripting: High proficiency in Java, Scala, or Python to write custom event-driven applications, producers/consumers, or user-defined functions (UDFs).
Infrastructure & Ecosystems: Solid understanding of cloud provider ecosystems(AWS, Azure, or GCP), modern containerization (Kubernetes/Operators), and hybrid/on-prem deployment patterns.
Enterprise Architecture & Governance: Robust knowledge of security frameworks (mTLS, SASL/SCRAM, OAuth), data privacy regulations, and schema evolution (Avro, Protobuf).
Persuasive Communication: Exceptional ability to deliver fundamental and highly customized presentations to multiple personas, seamlessly adapting language from low-level developers to C-suite and Line-of-Business (LoB) executives.
Competitive Intelligence: Strong understanding of how major competitors' products work, enabling you to proactively set competitive traps rather than simply reacting to standard objections.
Commercial Acumen: Clear understanding of consumption-based cloud pricing, subscription licensing, and billing models to design strategic deployment plays that optimize long-term customer value.
Preferred technical and professional experience
3–5 years of experience in a highly technical, customer-facing role (e.g., Solutions Engineering, Technical Consulting, or Enterprise Data Architecture).

Fluency in Spanish and English:

ABOUT BUSINESS UNIT:

IBM has a global presence, operating in more than 175 countries with a broad-based geographic distribution of revenue. The company’s Global Markets organization is a strategic sales business unit that manages IBM’s global footprint, working closely with dedicated country-based operating units to serve clients locally. These country teams have client relationship managers who lead integrated teams of consultants, solution specialists and delivery professionals to enable clients’ growth and innovation. By complementing local expertise with global experience and digital capabilities, IBM builds deep and broad-based client relationships. This local management focus fosters speed in supporting clients, addressing new markets and making investments in emerging opportunities. Additionally, the Global Markets organization serves clients with expertise in their industry as well as through the products and services that IBM and partners supply. IBM is also expanding its reach to new and existing clients through digital marketplaces.
YOUR LIFE @ IBM
In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that, dedication to our clients success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.
Being an IBMer means you’ll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you’ll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment everyday, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background.
Our IBMers are growth minded, always staying curious, open to feedback and learning new information and skills to constantly transform themselves and our company. They are trusted to provide on-going feedback to help other IBMers grow, as well as collaborate with colleagues keeping in mind a team focused approach to include different perspectives to drive exceptional outcomes for our customers. The courage our IBMers have to make critical decisions everyday is essential to IBM becoming the catalyst for progress, always embracing challenges with resources they have to hand, a can-do attitude and always striving for an outcome focused approach within everything that they do.
Are you ready to be an IBMer?
ABOUT IBM
IBM’s greatest invention is the IBMer. We believe that through the application of intelligence, reason and science, we can improve business, society and the human condition, bringing the power of an open hybrid cloud and AI strategy to life for our clients and partners around the world.
Restlessly reinventing since 1911, we are not only one of the largest corporate organizations in the world, we’re also one of the biggest technology and consulting employers, with many of the Fortune 500 companies relying on the IBM Cloud to run their business.
At IBM, we pride ourselves on being an early adopter of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and blockchain. Now it’s time for you to join us on our journey to being a responsible technology innovator and a force for good in the world.
IBM is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, or other characteristics protected by the applicable law. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.

OTHER RELEVANT JOB DETAILS:

For additional information about location requirements, please discuss with the recruiter following submission of your application.
Job Title

Advisory Solutions Engineer:

Job ID
125427
City / Township / Village
BARCELONA, Sevilla, Madrid, Valencia
State / Province
Madrid, Barcelona, Sevilla, Valencia
Country
Spain
Work arrangement
Remote
Area of work
Sales
Employment type
Regular
Position type
Professional
Travel required
Some travel may be required based on business demand
Company
(0126) International Business Machines, S.A.
Shift
General (daytime)
Is this role a commissionable/sales incentive based position?
Yes
Application Info
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