Your role and responsibilities
With Confluent, an IBM Company, organizations harness continuously flowing data to innovate and win in the modern digital world. We are defining a new category within data infrastructure - Streamhouse - so every organization can build real time experiences and use the power of data in ways that profoundly change how we all live and work.
One Confluent. One team. One Data Streaming Platform. Data connects us.
About the role
We are looking for a Senior Technical Marketing Manager (TMM) with strong software and data engineering foundations to drive adoption and awareness of Confluent among technical audiences, including developers, architects, data engineers, and technical executives. You will help turn bottom-up developer adoption into enterprise growth.
You will turn Confluent capabilities into clear, compelling technical stories, demos, and assets that show how Confluent solves real customer problems, including real-time AI and agentic use cases. You'll collaborate closely with Product Marketing, Product Management, Engineering, Developer Relations, and the Field to build and scale a world class library of technical content and demos.
You will help define and tell the story of Streamhouse, the emerging data architecture category in which applications and AI agents act on fresh, governed, real time business context.
What you will do
• Build flagship demos and solutions
• Design and implement realistic, reusable demos and reference solutions that showcase Confluent's Data Streaming Platform (Kafka, Flink, Iceberg, connectors, governance, security and access control, AI/ML and AI agent use cases).
• Operationalize these demos so they are reproducible, documented, and easy for others to run (field, partners, and customers).
• Create technical content that tells a story
• Author high quality technical content (blogs, whitepapers, reference architectures, lab guides, how to videos, webinars) that explains why and how to use Confluent to solve specific problems and use cases.
• Translate complex distributed systems concepts, such as exactly once semantics and event driven architecture, into clear narratives that connect architecture to business outcomes for audiences from engineers to CTOs and CFOs.
• Develop Streamhouse messaging, reference architectures, and proof points that show how Confluent's Data Streaming Platform captures, processes, governs, and serves real time context to production applications and AI agents.
• Partner on launches, campaigns, and use cases
• Collaborate with Product Marketing and Product Management on launches and campaigns: define the technical story, proof points, and required assets.
• Develop content around priority use cases (e.g., real time analytics, app modernization, real time AI and AI/ML pipelines, data warehouse offload) and key industries such as financial services and e commerce.
• Measure the impact of your work through adoption, usage, and pipeline influence, and iterate based on what the data shows.
• Show up as a technical expert in the field
• Deliver live and virtual workshops, hands on labs, webinars, and conference talks that demonstrate Confluent in action.
• Support strategic customer and partner conversations with demos, architectural deep dives, and technical validation.
• Enable the sales and field teams with technical training, demo kits, and playbooks that help them win deals.
• Represent Confluent in briefings with industry analysts and technical influencers.
• Drive technical proof and competitive clarity
• Build and maintain benchmarks, comparisons, and technical proof points that articulate Confluent's differentiation vs. alternatives (self managed Kafka, CSP native services, other stream processing platforms).
• Create competitive battlecards and objection handling guidance, and contribute to win/loss analysis, from a practitioner's perspective.
• Feed insights back into the product
• Act as the voice of the practitioner: synthesize feedback from demos, events, customers, and the field to identify product gaps and improvements.
• Partner with Product Management to prioritize developer and operator needs on the roadmap.
Required education
Bachelor's Degree
Required technical and professional expertise
• Hands on streaming and data experience
• 5+ years working with streaming/data technologies such as Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, Kafka Streams, Spark Structured Streaming, or similar.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, event driven architectures, and cloud native architectures.
• Solid software engineering skills
• Proficiency in at least one modern programming language (e.g., Java, Python) and strong SQL skills, with comfort writing production quality code, samples, and utilities.
• 5+ years of hands on experience with Kubernetes (K8s), plus Docker and other container platforms, for deploying and managing applications.
• Technical storytelling and content skills
• Demonstrated ability to create clear, accurate, and engaging technical content (blogs, talks, demos, labs, docs, or workshops).
• Talent for simplifying complex concepts without losing the important details, for both practitioner and executive audiences.
• Customer and field orientation
• Experience working directly with customers, sales, or solution teams (e.g., as a technical marketer, solutions architect, developer advocate, or sales engineer).
• Comfort gathering requirements, understanding real world constraints, and tailoring solutions and content accordingly.
• Collaboration and ownership
• Track record of end to end ownership: from idea - prototype - content - launch - iteration.
• Ability to work cross functionally across Product, Marketing, Engineering, and Field teams, balancing multiple stakeholders while keeping the practitioner and customer at the center.
• Self directed, comfortable managing multiple workstreams and making decisions without perfect information.
Preferred technical and professional experience
• Deep hands on experience with Confluent Cloud, Confluent Platform, and/or Apache Kafka at scale.
• Experience with Apache Flink (DataStream or Table/SQL APIs) or other stream processing engines in production.
• Familiarity with real time AI, AI agents, and agentic workflows built on streaming data (RAG pipelines, feature streams, context engineering, streaming ETL into vector/warehouse systems).
• Familiarity with open table and lakehouse formats such as Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, and Apache Paimon.
• Experience creating and delivering hands on workshops (e.g., using Terraform, cloud labs, or self service environments).
• Experience building competitive battlecards or sales enablement that improved win rates.
• Familiarity with the Streamhouse architecture and with building real time context for AI agents and production applications on streaming data.
• Prior experience in Technical Marketing, Developer Relations, or Product Marketing at an infrastructure or data platform company.
OTHER RELEVANT JOB DETAILS
IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to:
- Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being
- Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs
- Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law
- Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals
- Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences
We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law.
This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role.
IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.
The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year.
