Manager, Solutions Engineering, Anz

Confluent is pioneering a fundamentally new category of data infrastructure focused on data in motion. Have you ever found a new favourite 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 organisations 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 organisation. With Confluent, organisations 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 energised to roll up their sleeves and help realise 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.

The Manager, Solutions Engineering will be responsible for building and maintaining an outstanding team of Pre-sales Solutions Engineers (SEs). Key responsibilities are to recruit top talent, coach and mentor the SEs, lead with empathy and to ensure the team is able to succeed and grow in their careers.

The Manager will work hand in hand with Account Executives and Sales Managers to achieve shared revenue goals. An effective SE Manager will build trusted advisor relationships with customers, cloud providers and partners. The SE Manager will help the team focus on achieving the “technical win” on opportunities by providing accurate and compelling proposed solutions with a clear value proposition and a plan of success.

**What the role entails**:

- Lead a team of solutions engineers to deliver pre-sales technical support in sales presentations, solution development, and product demonstrations of Confluent.
- Lead, grow, and mentor your team to develop and maintain soft skills necessary to deliver, generate credibility and work effectively on a sales team - Preparation and documentation, technical discovery, objections handling and champion building.
- Lead, grow, and mentor your team to develop and maintain technical skills necessary to deliver proposed solutions and the surrounding ecosystem - Microservices, Network Security, Real-time Architectures, Cloud Deployments, Data Sources and Sinks.
- Develop and improve processes and procedures to minimise errors, maximise efficiencies and ensure the team can scale rapidly.
- Recognise areas where we can become more proactive and create a differentiated offering or employee experience.
- Relentless focus on customer success with regular customer engagement along with consumption monitoring to ensure that Confluent is delivering on the promised value.
- Collect, prioritise, and escalate Field Feedback requests to help guide the Confluent roadmap and maximise revenue and customer success.
- Strategise with Sales Management on how to best support our customers, define sales processes and grow Confluent value.
- Work with Sales Ops and HR to design and administer compensation plans, administer bonuses, performance reviews, skills development. Handle conflict or other HR issues that might arise within the team or between individuals across the organisation and build on Confluent’s #oneteam company values.
- Responsible for review and approval of Proof of Concept strategy and documentation.

**Ideally, you should possess**:

- Exceptional presentation and communications capabilities. Confidence presenting to a highly skilled and experienced audience, including enterprise architects and C-level executives
- At least 5 years of people management experience managing a highly effective pre-sales engineering team in a high growth phase of the company. SE Managers are expected to be player-coaches.
- At least 5 or more years of experience in a pre-sales engineering environment or similar customer-facing role Technical and sales skills and be seen as a pre-sales leader by example as much as a manager of people.
- Clear, consistent demonstration of self-starter behaviour and a desire to tackle hard problems.
- Track record of success in interviewing, hiring and developing a well performing team.
- Experience selling a Fully Managed SaaS product or transitioning from on-prem software to SaaS model.
- Experience with technical and commercial aspects of Public and Private Clouds.
- Experience with technical sales of distributed systems, middleware, and enterprise infrastructure software like databases, message queues, SaaS, or Big Data products.
- Previous experience building solutions within the Apache Kafka ecosystem.
- Experience selling an Open Source or Open Core