Solutions Engineer

Confluent, Chicago, Illinois

Real-Time Data at Massive Scale

Duration: Full-Time

Confluent is pioneering a fundamentally new category of data infrastructure focused on data in motion. Have you ever found a new favorite series on Netflix, picked up groceries curbside at Walmart, or paid for something using Square? That’s the power of data in motion in action—giving organizations instant access to the massive amounts of data that is constantly flowing throughout their business. At Confluent, we’re building the foundational platform for this new paradigm of data infrastructure. Our cloud-native offering is designed to be the intelligent connective tissue enabling real-time data, from multiple sources, to constantly stream across the organization. With Confluent, organizations can create a central nervous system to innovate and win in a digital-first world.

We’re looking for self-motivated team members who crave a challenge and feel energized to roll up their sleeves and help realize Confluent’s enormous potential. Chart your own path and take healthy risks as we solve big problems together. We value having diverse teams and want you to grow as we grow—whether you’re just starting out in your career or managing a large team, you’ll be amazed at the magnitude of your impact.

Confluent Solutions Engineers (Pre-Sales) drive the technical evaluation stage of the overall sales process, making them critical drivers of customer success as real time data streams become more and more important in the modern enterprise. In this role you will partner with account reps to be the technical advisor on the sales team, work very closely with the product management and engineering teams, and serve as a vital product advocate in front of prospects, customers, and the wider Kafka and Data Streaming communities.

You will be a trusted advisor to Confluent customers as they undertake technical design and development of their end-to-end solution, be conversant with the current state and future roadmap of Kafka in open source and be able to identify known issues and inform them of upcoming fixes or workarounds. You’ll also be responsible for clear articulation of Confluent’s technical and product positioning to a wide variety of business and technical stakeholders, and for forging strong relationships with them throughout the sales cycle and beyond.

What we're looking for:

Experience with distributed systems, infrastructure software like databases, message queues, data-focused SaaS, or Big Data products
Confidence presenting to customers - a highly skilled, technical and business audience
Clear, consistent demonstration of self-starter behavior and a desire to learn new things and tackle hard technical problems
Proficiency in one of Java or Python or SQL
Experience building or running cloud applications

What gives you an edge:

Previous sales engineering work experience
Previous experience building solutions with Apache Kafka
Work experience with data integration or application architecture
Understanding of systems operations concepts (disk, network, operating systems, etc)
Experience building and operating distributed systems
Technical certs - CS degree or cloud developer/architect/administrator
Confluent Certified Developer or Confluent Certified Administrator (https://www.confluent.io/certification/)

Resources to help you prepare:

Confluent Certified Developer or Confluent Certified Administrator (https://www.confluent.io/certification/)
What is Apache Kafka?
Kafka Summit 2020
Keynote: Jay Kreps, Confluent | Kafka Summit 2020
Weekly live streaming YouTube show, LiveStreams, hosted by Viktor Gamov
12 Days of Single Message Transforms
12 Days of Apache Kafka by Tim Berglund
Introducing Confluent Platform 6.0
Confluent Developer homepage
Confluent Press Releases
Confluent: In the News

Come As You Are

At Confluent, equality is a core tenet of our culture. We are committed to building an inclusive global team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, beliefs, and experiences. The more diverse we are, the richer our community and the broader our impact. Employment decisions are made on the basis of job-related criteria without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other classification protected by applicable law.

Confluent requires all employees (in office and remote) in the U.S. to be vaccinated for COVID-19. Consistent with federal, state, and local requirements, Confluent will consider requests for reasonable accommodation based on medical conditions/contraindications or sincerely-held religious beliefs where it is able to do so without undue hardship to the company.

Click here to review our California Candidate Privacy Notice, which describes how and when Confluent, Inc., and its group companies, collects, uses, and shares certain personal information of California job applicants and prospective employees.

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About Confluent

Our Story Founded by the team that built Apache Kafka®, Confluent builds a streaming platform that enables companies to easily access data as real-time streams Background Every byte of data has a story to tell, something of significance that will inform the next thing to be done. In a data-driven enterprise, how we move our data becomes nearly as important as the data itself. With greater speed and agility, data’s value increases exponentially. From its very early days, we have open-sourced Apache Kafka™ and have led it to impressive industry-wide adoption across several thousand companies. Now we are focusing on building a streaming platform to help other companies get easy access to enterprise data as real-time streams.