Confluent - Technical Support Professional

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'l have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world.

Your role and responsibilities

As a Technical Support Engineer on the Platform, Security & Cloud (PSC) team, you'll help customers solve their hardest problems with security, networking and infrastructure in Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform. You'll work directly with customers' engineering, network and security teams to diagnose and resolve issues, including production-impacting incidents. You'll also be the link that brings what you see in the field back to our engineering teams.

What You Will Do

• Troubleshoot and resolve customer issues across Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform, with a focus on security, cloud networking and Kubernetes deployments

• Lead live troubleshooting sessions with customer engineering, network and security teams on production-impacting issues

• Reproduce problems, analyze logs and configuration, and escalate clearly to engineering when an issue is a product bug or platform limit

• Give our engineering teams real-time product feedback from the field, and write knowledge base articles and documentation

• Help improve team processes as the team grows, and keep building your knowledge of Apache Kafka and the Confluent ecosystem

Required technical and professional expertise

Required

• Excitement about streaming data and becoming an expert in Apache Kafka

• A track record of diagnosing, reproducing and resolving technical issues for customers or users, in environments you don't directly own

• Comfortable on live calls during production-impacting issues, and able to explain findings clearly to both customers and engineers

• Confident on the Linux command line, reading logs and stack traces to find root cause

• Two of these three:

• Security: TLS/certificates, authentication (SASL, OAuth, mTLS) and authorization (ACLs, RBAC)

• Cloud networking: DNS, routing, firewalls and proxies, and private connectivity (PrivateLink, VPC peering) on at least one cloud provider

• Infrastructure: running applications on Kubernetes, or deploying with Ansible or Terraform

Preferred technical and professional experience

• Experience with SSO and identity providers (Microsoft Entra ID, Okta)

• Hands-on experience with Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform, including upgrades or KRaft migrations

IBM is committed to creating a diverse environment and 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, caste, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, veteran status, or other characteristics. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.