Confluent - Cloud Subject Matter Expert

IBM
IBM

Remote

Posted on Sep 12, 2026
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 Cloud Subject Matter Expert, you play a key role in enhancing the client experience and resolving issues impacting IBM client business. You lead the problem resolution process through analysis and troubleshooting of various complexity issues to ensure client satisfaction and minimize business impact.

Your primary responsibilities will include:

  • Serving as the primary technical authority, escalation point and design advisor for the customer’s Kafka and Confluent Cloud platform, partnering with platform, application and SRE teams
  • Advising on the optimization of data streaming architectures and adoption of Confluent functionality and best practices to maximize business value, ROI, resilience and stability of production workloads
  • Designing and reviewing enterprise-grade event-driven architectures, including topic design, schema strategy, data contracts and integration patterns
  • Proactively identifying and resolving operational issues before they affect business continuity, while advising on production readiness, monitoring, capacity planning, failure handling, operational runbooks and change management
  • Guiding security, access control, governance, risk, compliance and audit alignment for platform usage
  • Delivering hands-on architecture reviews,technical workshops and best-practice coaching to promote customer self-sufficiency
  • Supporting incident response and root cause analysis while contributing to proof-of-concept development, operational software designs, reusable patterns and customer-informed product improvements
Required education
Bachelor's Degree
Preferred education
Master's Degree
Required technical and professional expertise

Required Professional and Technical Expertise:

  • Technical leadership as an authority, escalation point or design advisor for enterprise Kafka and Confluent Cloud platforms
  • Analysis and troubleshooting of complex technical issues across distributed systems and client IT environments, including performance, reliability, connectivity, configuration, billing and account-related issues, along with the development of solutions or workarounds that minimize business impact
  • Design or review of event-driven architectures and guidance on production readiness, operational excellence and change management
  • Coordination and collaboration with cross-functional teams, including Development, Services, Field, Support, Engineering, platform, application and SRE teams, to deliver relevant, timely and effective solutions
  • Creation and reuse of knowledge assets, technical documentation and enablement content to promote client self-sufficiency and improve team effectiveness
  • Use of case data and client feedback to drive improvements in product quality, functionality, serviceability and usability
Preferred technical and professional experience

Preferred Professional and Technical Expertise :

  • Proficiency with Kafka, Confluent Cloud, Kafka Streams, Apache Flink, Schema Registry and Kafka Connect in enterprise production environments
  • Advanced troubleshooting of complex distributed-system and client IT environment issues involving multiple services, integrations, dependencies or failure modes
  • Delivery of hands-on architecture reviews, technical workshops and deep-dive sessions while developing secure, governed and reusable solutions that promote self-sufficiency for developers, platform teams and operations teams
  • Work in regulated or highly controlled environments, contributing product feedback, reference architectures, reusable patterns and technical documentation based on enterprise customer use cases

ABOUT BUSINESS UNIT

IBM Software infuses core business operations with intelligence—from machine learning to generative AI—to help make organizations more responsive, productive, and resilient. IBM Software helps clients put AI into action now to create real value with trust, speed, and confidence across digital labor, IT automation, application modernization, security, and sustainability. Critical to this is the ability to make use of all data, because AI is only as good as the data that fuels it. In most organizations data is spread across multiple clouds, on premises, in private datacenters, and at the edge. IBM’s AI and data platform scales and accelerates the impact of AI with trusted data, and provides leading capabilities to train, tune and deploy AI across business. IBM’s hybrid cloud platform is one of the most comprehensive and consistent approach to development, security, and operations across hybrid environments—a flexible foundation for leveraging data, wherever it resides, to extend AI deep into a business.

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

IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to:

- Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being

- Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs

- Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law

- Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals

- Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences

We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law.

This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role.

IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.

The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year.