Sr. Director, Americas Support

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.

About the Role

Confluent's Global Technical Support Team is a critical part of why our customers love us. Our team of Technical Support Engineers work directly with our customers to help them successfully leverage Confluent's self-managed and hosted Kafka offerings. We're looking for an experienced support leader to manage and grow a distributed team of Support Managers and Technical Support Engineers and to play a critical role in scaling our internal processes for supporting Confluent Cloud customers across the Americas region. Strong empathy and communication skills are a must. You should have a passion for making customers successful and be willing to contribute to the development of processes needed for scaling a fast growing team. We're a fast growing company, so the qualified candidate will be the type of person who is always looking to raise the bar and improve our customer support experience.

What you'll do

• Lead a large team of support personnel with the aim of providing exemplary service to the Americas customer base while also ensuring the team continues to operate smoothly as part of the global "follow-the-sun" support team fabric.
• Regularly work with the rest of our Global Support leadership team to identify and implement support processes and procedures aimed at minimizing errors, maximizing efficiency, and ensuring that our global support team can maintain level of service while our customer base scales exponentially.
• Create and foster an environment that leads to a highly engaged and productive support workforce that lives our values of Customer Love, #Oneteam, and "Smart, Humble, Empathetic".
• Conduct management functions such as interview/hire qualified candidates, conduct performance reviews, and actively participate in employee career planning to help them achieve their long-term goals, reduce churn, increase employee satisfaction, and manage underperformance.
• Collaborating with sales, customer success and other field teams on addressing issues which may be impeding customers' success with Confluent products and expansion of use within an account.
• Communicating directly with the product management and engineering teams to address issues which necessitate attention from those teams (including advocating for feature requests, where appropriate).
• Manage, grow, and guide managers and senior managers tasked with ensuring Support quality, SLA, and CSAT requirements are met or exceeded.

What we're looking for

• 10+ years experience in a technical support environment, handling highly complex issues for IaaS, PaaS or SaaS product offerings.
• 5+ years managing director / senior manager levels in addition to individual contributors, providing support to large enterprise customers.
• Experience with Infrastructure products such as Middleware, Databases, Microservices, and legacy system modernization.
• Deep knowledge of both public cloud and on-prem software support.
• Strong understanding of operational infrastructure, metrics, processes, systems and tools for running a Worldwide Support organization.
• Demonstrated success at influencing and dealing confidently and professionally with internal & external executive level stakeholders.
• Ability to respond to high-profile, high-impact customer/product escalations in a way that drives customer satisfaction and earns trust.
• Exceptional presentation and communications capabilities. Confidence presenting to a highly skilled and experienced audience, including enterprise architects and C-level executives.
• Clear, consistent demonstration of self-starter behavior and autonomous work with a desire to tackle hard problems.
• Ability to participate in management escalation on call rotations, including occasionally on holidays and weekends when required.

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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