Customer Success Engineering Manager - Data & AI Platform

IBM
IBM

Software Engineering, Other Engineering, Sales & Business Development, Data Science, Customer Service

Markham, ON, Canada

Posted on Jun 18, 2026
Introduction

IBM has spent more than a century building the technology that business and society run on, and that work has never mattered more than it does right now. Data and AI are reshaping how every serious company operates, and the ones who get it right will define the next decade of their industry. The ones who get it wrong will spend that decade trying to catch up.

Our Data & AI Platform team is where that work happens in Canada. We partner with a focused group of the country's most important companies, the ones we're committed to growing with for the long run, and we help them connect real technology to the real problems they're trying to solve, at speed. We don't deal in someday. We turn ambition into systems that actually work, and we inspire the people we work with to think bigger about what's possible.

What makes this team different isn't the portfolio. It's how we work. We're a community of builders, and we would rather get our hands on the technology and show a client what's possible than talk at them from a slide. When that community is strong, when people trust each other and believe in what they're doing, the results follow. We're looking for someone to lead one of these teams and build it for the next group of people coming up.

Your role and responsibilities

You'll lead a team of Customer Success Engineers, our technical experts, helping a mix of Canadian companies realize the full value of IBM's data and AI portfolio. Your clients won't all look alike. Some are large enterprises and financial institutions, others are mid-sized manufacturers and growing businesses across the country. What connects them is ambition, and your team's job is to help them thrive with AI by connecting real technology to the real problems they're trying to solve.

Developing your people is the heart of this role. Some on your team are seasoned, some are earlier in their journey, and your job is the same either way: make good people great. You'll do it the way the best leaders do, by being in the room with them, helping them frame the value, find the story, and believe in what they're bringing to the conversation. People sell with conviction when they feel it themselves, and your job is to build a team where they do. You coach, you develop, and you inspire, and you measure yourself by how much better your people get while they work for you.

This is also a growth role. Creating demand is at the centre of it, and you'll think bigger than your own team about how IBM shows up for its clients. You'll be a force across the wider sales organization, helping sellers build value propositions that mean something, tell a better story, and connect our technology to the outcomes their clients care about.

In this role you will:

  • Lead, coach, and grow a team of Customer Success Engineers covering the full data platform portfolio across a range of Canadian enterprise and commercial accounts
  • Develop technical talent at every level into confident sellers who can connect technology to business value, not just deliver a strong demo, and treat this as the heart of the role
  • Partner with your engineers on their accounts to frame value, sharpen the story, and build the conviction that moves clients
  • Help drive demand across the broader organization, working with sellers to build stronger value propositions and tell better stories
  • Own the technical sales strategy for your portfolio, from the first conversation through proof to adoption and growth
  • Build and run enablement that raises the whole team's game, from demos and proofs to accelerators and skills development
  • Engage directly with client architects, data leaders, and executives as a credible technical and commercial peer
  • Recruit, build, and retain a strong technical bench, and create a team culture people genuinely want to be part of
  • Partner with the brand sales teams on pipeline, technical qualification, and forecasting across the portfolio

Required education
Associate's Degree/College Diploma
Preferred education
Master's Degree
Required technical and professional expertise
  • 10 or more years of experience in enterprise technology, including at least 5 years in a client-facing technical sales, pre-sales, or solutions engineering role where you owned technical outcomes on real deals
  • A consistent track record of meeting or exceeding sales or technical sales targets across multiple years
  • Experience leading or developing technical people, whether as a formal manager or as the senior person a team learned from
  • Enough real depth in enterprise data architecture to earn a technical team's respect and engage architects and CTOs as a peer rather than a translator
  • Commercial instinct you can demonstrate, meaning you understand that the goal is not a strong demo but a client who decides to move, and you can point to deals where your technical leadership was the difference
  • You can run a whiteboard session with an architect in the morning and a boardroom conversation with an executive in the afternoon, and be effective in both
  • You measure yourself by how much better your people get while they work for you, and you can show it through retention, promotion, and engagement
Preferred technical and professional experience
  • You're an operator who runs everything to outcomes. You make active calls on where your team spends its time and energy rather than inheriting whatever structure was already there, you keep the system of record clean and use it to actually run the business, and you bring real commercial discipline, the kind that inspects pipeline, qualifies honestly with no hero math, and produces a forecast you can defend.
  • A demonstrable record of influencing significant pipeline and large, complex enterprise deals, ideally across a portfolio of multiple strategic accounts at once
  • 2 or more years of direct people leadership, with measurable results in team performance, retention, and development
  • You hold the full thread as one architecture, trusted and catalogued data, open formats, security, and the governance that lets AI scale on top of it, with real fluency in the technologies underneath.
  • Experience selling into or working with large regulated enterprises, with financial services a real advantage
  • A track record of building enablement, demos, or proofs that measurably changed how a team sells
  • Relevant certifications across cloud, data, or AI platforms
  • A bias to build, the kind of person who builds the thing instead of writing a deck about the thing

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

Must have the ability to work in Canada without sponsorship.

This role will involve working with technology that is covered by Export Regulations sanctions. If you are a Foreign National from any of the following US sanctioned countries (Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and the Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia regions of Ukraine) on a work permit, you are not eligible for employment in this position.