Senior Solutions Architect (Japan)

We’re not just building better tech. We’re rewriting how data moves and what the world can do with it. With Confluent, data doesn’t sit still. Our platform puts information in motion, streaming in near real-time so companies can react faster, build smarter, and deliver experiences as dynamic as the world around them.

It takes a certain kind of person to join this team. Those who ask hard questions, give honest feedback, and show up for each other. No egos, no solo acts. Just smart, curious humans pushing toward something bigger, together.

One Confluent. One Team. One Data Streaming Platform.

About the Role:

We are looking for a Solutions Architect to join our Professional Services team in Japan. As a Solutions Architect (SA), you will help customers leverage streaming architectures and applications to achieve their business results. In this role, you will interact directly with customers to provide software architecture, design, and operations expertise that leverages your deep knowledge of and experience in Apache Kafka, the Confluent platform, and complementary systems such as Hadoop, Spark, Storm, relational and NoSQL databases. You will develop and advocate best practices, gather and validate critical product feedback, and help customers overcome their operational challenges.

Throughout all these interactions, you will build a strong relationship with your customer in a very short space of time, ensuring exemplary delivery standards. You will also have the opportunity to help customers build state-of-the-art streaming data infrastructure, in partnership with colleagues who are widely recognized as industry leaders, as well as optimizing and debugging customers existing deployments. .

What You Will Do:

• Helping a customer determine his/her platform and/or application strategy for moving to a more real-time, event-based business. Such engagements often involve remote preparation; presenting an onsite or remote workshop for the customer’s architects, developers, and operations teams; investigating (with Engineering and other coworkers) solutions to difficult challenges; and writing a recommendations summary doc.

• Providing feedback to the Confluent Product and Engineering groups

• Building tooling for another team or the wider company to help us push our technical boundaries and improve our ability to deliver consistently with high quality

• Testing performance and functionality of new components developed by Engineering

• Writing or editing documentation and knowledge base articles, including reference architecture materials and design patterns based on customer experiencesHoning your skills, building applications, or trying out new product features

• Participating in community and industry events

What You Will Bring:

• Deep experience designing, building, and operating in-production Big Data, stream processing, and/or enterprise data integration solutions, ideally using Apache Kafka

• Demonstrated experience successfully managing multiple B2B infrastructure software development projects, including driving expansion, customer satisfaction, feature adoption, and retention

• Experience operating Linux (configure, tune, and troubleshoot both RedHat and Debian-based distributions)

• Experience using cloud providers (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure) for running high-throughput systems

• Experience with Java Virtual Machine (JVM) tuning and troubleshooting

• Experience with distributed systems (Kafka, Hadoop, Cassandra, etc.)

• Proficiency in Java

• Strong desire to tackle hard technical problems, and proven ability to do so with little or no direct daily supervision

• Excellent communication skills, with an ability to clearly and concisely explain tricky issues and complex solutions

• Ability to quickly learn new technologies

• Ability and willingness to travel to meet with customers

• At least 4-7 years of Professional Services Experience

• Professional Proficiency in Japanese is a MUST

Ready to build what's next? Let’s get in motion.

Come As You Are

Belonging isn’t a perk here. It’s the baseline. We work across time zones and backgrounds, knowing the best ideas come from different perspectives. And we make space for everyone to lead, grow, and challenge what’s possible.

We’re proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. Employment decisions are based on 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 law.