Customer Success Engineer

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 is searching for a Customer Success Engineer to join our growing Success Engineering team. In this role, you will serve as a proactive and deeply technical guide to our customers as they adopt Confluent's Stream Data Platform. Many of these customers use Confluent's products for strategic and mission critical use cases and your goal will be to apply your deep technical expertise to help them avoid issues before they occur. Strong candidates for this position will bring a mix of strong communication skills and technical depth, as the role will involve engaging directly with customers as they work to deploy and operate Kafka and other Confluent products.

In this role, you will have the opportunity to build broad experience with Kafka, the Confluent Platform and work with a variety of organizations ranging from new start-ups to large enterprise customers. Throughout all of these interactions, you will build strong relationships with customers, ensure exemplary delivery standards, and have a lot of fun helping our customers build state-of-the-art streaming data infrastructure alongside colleagues who are widely recognized as leaders in this space.

Locations: this is a remote-friendly position and we are open to anywhere in Central or East Coast.

A typical week at Confluent in this role may involve...

• Working directly with customers throughout their onboarding phase to deliver technical guidance, conduct check-in calls and proactively remove blockers to their deployment and usage of Confluent products
• Collaborating with our Customer Success Managers and Account teams to develop "Success Plans" for your accounts
• Engaging with customers to proactively prepare for upgrades, go-lives, and other important events to ensure success during critical periods
• Contributing to process development - we're a young team, so we're looking for people who want to help us lay the foundation for growing efficiently and with a best-in-class culture
• When necessary, roll up your sleeves and dig in to help address customer issues alongside Confluent Support Engineers and Core Engineering
• Leverage knowledge of your customers' environments to assist Support Engineers and Professional Services teams in better serving your customersUse your knowledge of your customers' environments and use cases to influence the roadmap of Confluent products
• When necessary, recommend proactive measures to help customers avoid issues and to ensure customer success (e.g. professional services engagements, training sessions, on-site visits, etc.)Improving product documentation and authoring knowledge base articles
• Creating and reviewing product demos and internal tooling

Required skills and experience

• Excitement to learn about streaming data and to become a domain expert in Apache Kafka
• Experience in diagnosing, reproducing, and resolving customer issues
• Desire to make customers successful through direct interaction2+ years in Customer Support, Success Engineering or other technical Customer Success position
• Excellent written and communication skills
• Experience troubleshooting applications running on Linux (resource contention, network bottlenecks, etc.)
• Operational knowledge of Java applications (jstack, jmap, etc.) or at least one other programming language (preferably JVM-based)

Other nice to have:

• Experience with major cloud providers such as GCP, AWS and Azure
• Experience with at least one mainstream distributed system (e.g. Kafka, Hadoop, Cassandra, etc.)
• Knowledge of container technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes

Preferred Qualifications:

Confluent Certified Developer or Confluent Certified Administrator (https://www.confluent.io/certification/)

Culture is a huge part of Confluent, we're searching for the best people who not only excel at their role, but also contribute to the health, happiness and growth of the company. Inclusivity and openness are important traits, with regular company wide and team events. Here are some of the personal qualities we're looking for:

Smart, humble and empathetic

• Hard working, you get things done
• Hungry to learn in a field which is ever evolving
• Adaptable to the myriad of challenges each day can present
• Inquisitive and not afraid to ask all the questions, no matter how basic
• Ready to roll up your sleeves and help others, getting involved in projects where you feel you can add value
• Strive for excellence in your work, your team and the company

Come and build with us. We are one of the fastest growing software companies in the market. A company built on the tenets of transparency, direct communication and inclusivity. Come meet the streams dream team and have a direct impact on how we shape Confluent.

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.

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